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My definition (purpose) of IT Operations  ”The Operating System”

“An explicitly specified system of work that consists of a structured, controlled and measured approach to the continuous delivery of existing IT Services and Service Assets in order to achieve the goals of business.  The system accurately illustrates capacity, describes, manages and measures the flow of work in to operations via Service Transition and Standard Operations Requests and compares their actual resulting output to business expectations.

The Operations System collectively focuses on  preventive action first, detective controls that instrument variance from specified acceptable operating states, and lastly when operations are interrupted, specified structured  corrective measures that deliver root cause analysis with corresponding countermeasures to prevent reoccurrence are used to restore operation.”

I know you have operating systems in IT but do you have an IT Operations System? If you do, could it be better? Next post I will look in to the pillars of “The Operating System”

Kevin Behr

 “I wish we had dedicated project resources. I am so busy with operations that I just don’t have time for projects.”

“Why does every IT issue get escalated to my top network and security people?”

“I don’t care if you have enough time. I need this stuff done now.”

“It takes me more time to fill out a change request than to make the actual change”

“We spend over 70% of our time doing operations which only leaves me 10-15% to work on projects after I read my email”

Sound Familiar?

I love the provocative statement that Goldratt made (I paraphrase):

“Technology CAN (not does) provide value IF and only IF it diminishes a business constraint.”

Before you go off emailing me that technology has many other values please reflect deeply on this statement.  Please reflect deeply on what business value IT provides. 

I love the notion of continuity that the “diminishes” brings to the statement.  In other words the constraint must be continually diminished as opposed to the word vanquished.

In order for the constraint to be continually diminished the technology must operate without ceasing or the constraint is re-introduced and the business is forced to deal with the issue once more, usually without any warning.

One could argue that not all applications in service deliver the best business value. But for the purposes of this discussion on IT operations let us assume that everything we are running in our datacenters provides the business with some critical constraint-busting capability.

By doing everything we can to ensure that those systems continue to operate free of interruption we are performing IT operations that support business operations.

The basic definition of Operations is “The act of harvesting value from resources”.  More specific to IT I believe that IT operations represent our collective approach (strategy) and tactics (tasks, instructions, and programs) designed to prevent outages and interruptions to the IT services that existing business operations depend on.

Since the whole point of business operations at large is to produce profit (or achieve the mission for you non-profits) from its resources, when we perform IT operations successfully we are protecting business revenue generation.  I like to call it “protecting revenue” for short

You may notice that firefighting, support or outages did not appear in my definition or mission of operations.

This is very important.

When we are troubleshooting, or firefighting an outage, operations have ceased and we are now in recovery mode (attempting to recover operations).  Even if the issue is service impairment versus a full blown IT black-out we are attempting to recover from the situation and therefore are not in nominal operation. Both scenarios interrupt or affect business operations and can put revenue at risk in many ways.

So if you were really spending 70% of your time in operations..Do you think there would be so much chaos?

Next Post I will talk more about defining and measuring operations and the value it can provide. 

kb

I just received this email from my colleague Steve Spear whom I am working on several articles with at the moment.  Congrats Steve!  You deserve this award for some of the most profound work I can remember!

“Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I’m delighted that my book, Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and What Great Companies Can Do to Catch Up and Win, has received welcome accolades in the last few days.  The book was awarded a Shingo Prize for Research Excellence, and it received a flattering appraisal in Harvard Business Review’s April issue.

The reviewer, Anand J. Raman, writes:

            Spear…has dazzled readers with his insights into what makes 

            Toyota tick and his understanding of how any organization can 

            use those ideas to improve its effectiveness. Not surprisingly, his 

            first tome was highly anticipated, and it’s probably an understatement 

            to say that it won’t disappoint.

He concludes…

            I have a dozen books on Toyota stacked on my shelf, in order from the 

            least read to the most referred to-and Chasing the Rabbit is probably 

            going to stay right on top of the pile.

Chasing the Rabbit is based on my research which was initially meant to answer the question: Why was Toyota doing so well despite (a) being in a hyper competitive market, (b) starting well behind its rivals, and (c) having been studied and imitated intensely?  

The answer was that for all the attention that outsiders had paid to particular production control tools, the company’s real genius was its management system that fostered and sustained high velocity, high endurance improvement, innovation, and invention across a broad range of work. I later found other organizations that had arrived at similar approaches, and with the generous help of myriad practitioners showed that this ‘high velocity’ approach has great impact across a broad range of situations.       

Based on this research, Chasing the Rabbit explains how competitive advantage can be generated in even the most arduous markets and illustrates its points with diverse examples from heavy and high tech manufacturing, new product development and production, commercial and military situations, and health care.

I’m much indebted to those who helped advance this work over many years and it is my hope that their efforts and mine prove to be useful to you and your colleagues as you attempt to generate far more value with far less effort than most in your fields even imagine possible.

With best wishes,

Steve Spear

Senior Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Please visit my blog: http://chasingtherabbitbook.com “

I highly recommend this book and keep an eye out for our articles on IT and healthcare!

When asked to improve, what is ITs obsession with the dream of total automation of everything?

Is it the ultimate exercise in black-and-white thinking? Given the reality of countless failed automation efforts marked by dead-bodies, is there a better middle road?

This basis of my ensuing posteriori-logic-trap becomes especially apparent when one begins to peel away at the thin veneer that obscures the complete failure of IT at large to operate in the realm of the scientific method.

In my dictionary, automation merely consists of  defined practices, values and expected outcomes committed to code. But I have found that in the crucial connective fascia between; Project Management, DEV, QA and Ops, IT often lacks substantive specification, accurate documentation which often yields non-deterministic untraceable outcomes (action x and y caused effect z).

Ok, this may be a pretty harsh statement, but one that is borne out of over 20 years in IT, working with hundreds of IT organizations that struggle to accurately articulate either the goal or the definition of IT operations.  If nearly every implicit destination defined below those two map coordinates is off by even single digit percentages and we consider the length and breadth of the IT journey, not to mention the height of the weeds we can get caught up in, well let’s just say chronic ITFAIL pain is both aft and on the horizon.

In the great book, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes the classic story of GMs “must replace labor with robots” fail is told in brutal hindsight.  The lessons are clear but are an order of magnitude harsher when one considers the lesson that history has now taught us.  Not only was the money they spent on those automation efforts lost to their deficient consitency of practice (automation just accelerated their rate of failure) but they could have purchased Nissan, Toyota, Honda and maybe even Mazda with the money they squandered on robots.

Only after years of trial and error have manufacturers struck a balance between automation and human involvement.  Shigeo Shingo, the first person to document the Toyota Production system author of many amazing books including, Kaizen and the Art of Creative Thinking - The Scientific Thinking Mechanism, formalized this approach by refining the Japanese concept of Jidoka or Autonomation.  Simply put, Autonomation is automation with human intelligence.  This is the direction we need to explore in IT for our command and control systems.

To help define just where the intersection and labor divisions should best occur there are several Toyota Production system terms that are worth investigating as a path to improving your shop’s performance

Muri - Overburden - Is every day an exercise in futility? The email piles up the issues escalated, phone calls from execs, standing daily or weekly outage conference calls? Is your IT organization behind or stuck on projects?  How many of these precious business projects are missing their commitment dates, over budget, under resourced because your team is overwhelmed with unplanned firefighting and drive-bys?

Mura- Inconsistency - Routine tasks and changes are like roulette with a two out of ten ending in unexplained failure that consumes your brightest staff for hours or days?  Is patching or upgrading a fearful event which is marked by all knocking on wooden or even wood veneered objects and the presence of a shaman or holy person to ward off evil fail spirits?

Muda -Waste-All of those operating expense dollars lost to firefighting, audit corrective action drive-bys, shadow IT projects, unauthorized changes and root cause analysis meetings that take weeks to recommend the same trifecta of we need more budget, more staff and more time to focus on proactive tasks?

Right now many IT organizations are looking at Muda or waste in order to drive down costs.  I posit that understanding Muri and Mura would be a much more valuable use of time and ultimately will reduce waste and increase IT throughput

Inevitably the solutions recommended by IT teams to these issues will involve automation or tools.  This is not all bad, but the focus should be on building more deterministic ways of working for humans and considering where automation may help humans interact with their IT infrastructure more consistently.

This process of self reflection or Hansei is important fuel for Kaizen (continuous improvement).  It becomes essential to distill all of the undesirable symptoms of overburden, inconsistency and waste and understand the few root causes that drive them all.

Did you know that the “Just In Time’ concept was pioneered by a group of Toyota Employees? These Toyota team members were lead by Taiichi Ono on a trip to the US in the 1950s to visit US auto manufacturers .  They journeyed to Michigan and walked through Ford plants and were generally unimpressed by the high amounts of inventory they required to operate and the variance in labor output from day to day.

During the visit they stopped by a Piggly Wiggly grocery store and were amazed by their inventory replenishment system that only requested new items when they were sold. From this focus on Kaizen and Hansei they developed what later became the famous Just-In-Time philosophy that has become a pillar of the Toyota Production System.

It is not merely enough to improve in this economy, we are faced with the imperative of only improving the most important functions so as to quickly improve execution and IT throughput. As we set out on our journeys and investigation of other practices let’s make sure we are attacking true root causes of overburden and rework not just merely their undesirable effects.

I think that the Toyota Production System offers us many valuable insights in to building better IT. I find the thinking behind the system to be more enlightening than the practices. I encourage you to view all TPS, Lean and “Best Practices” in this light. Often the answer to “why” is more important than the “what” IMHO.

I will be writing more about the intersections of TPS and IT.  I will be focusing on universal principles, that draw from Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints work, Steven Spear, Taiichi Ohno, Shingeo Shingo, Deming and the 10 years of research Gene Kim and I have done around IT high performance, in the coming weeks.

Have you ever read “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering“?

If so you are a rare bird (or over 45) in today’s tech zoo.

I wish I could drop this book (among many others such as The Goal, Critical Chain, The Machine that Changed the World, Great Boss Dead Boss, and Chasing the Rabbit  - see the right side column to buy them!) out of airplanes and organize study groups with my IT; operations, security, audit, project management, executive management and yes especially development brethren.

I was reflecting on this text and several other seminal management books I have collected over the years and I decided I needed to write a series for my blog on this topic. As of late Gene Kim and I are working on some amazing projects for fun and exciting internet 2.0 companies. We have been writing a new IT management novel with George Spafford (think “The Goal” for IT) , and helping a bunch of IT shops solve the quality, reliability and cost reduction realities that have now become must-do (all at the same time mind you).

Just yesterday we began working with long time collaborator and joyful subversive, Eileen Forrester, from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

We are shaping up a few writing projects for the newly released CMMI-Service model.  Eileen has been in charge of getting the new model released on time and has actually over-performed and it is out much earlier than expected for the first time in history.

I relish the opportunity to exchange ideas and approaches for improving the delivery of services with folks from all sectors of the economy (especially those disciplines outside of the IT world).

Many of these industries and business disciplines have a long history of systems design and improvement that reads like rich history.

Where is this similar lineage taught and practiced for IT today?

As I work with many IT executives and teams around the globe I often find myself wondering if the collective “we” has forgotten more than we have learned up to this point.

For a community that not only leans towards scientific interest our entire profession exists on the shoulders of science (knowledge and technology are the output) so little of the way we actually do IT is built on the scientific method or around what I have dubbed the “System Building and Continuous Improving Arts” (SBCIA).  We often are just reacting rather than treating every request as a hypothesis and making sure we have built a repeatable response that correctly satisfies all of the implicit assumptions in the request.

To better explain what I am talking about I will use the Japanese term RYU, which denotes the flow of water.  The idea represents formal Japanese traditions such as the Martial Arts.  In Karate fluidity and finding one’s path are compared.  Water will find its own path in balance with the terrain it is surrounded by, just as the Karate student must advance through his or her path by practice and training.

Bringing me to the point of my concern in this post…

Much of “the path” for IT practitioners and managers of all levels travels through the acquisition and appropriation of myopic technical domain knowledge (yes even auditors). In other words “what we must know” so “we” know how to react in a given technical situation”.

What is missing?  What we need to understand holistically (see) to decide how we should work together as a system .  This information is both timeless and too time consuming to amass through trial and error in our own life experience. The old adage applies here “Time may be the best teacher but it kills all of its pupils”. In order to amass the collective wisdom about how to see the work in order to build an effective system to do the work, we need the collective wisdom of our predecessors and our current community at large. We also need to look outside of our industry and find analogs to improve our execution, quality and safety with larger and scientifically validated levers. Stop chasing consensus based “Best Practices” and start purpose-building systems around scientifically proven practices.

There is much room in IT to build a new flow of knowledge about the “System Building and Continuous Improving Arts” (SBCIA).  This economy is shaping up to be the ultimate Dojo for us to do so.  Let’s just say performance is no longer optional but survival is.

So pick up a copy of “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering” and start a study group and learn from your ancestors.  Create a culture of Kung-Fu, a Chinese term that means “individual accomplishment or skill cultivated through long and hard work” .  Set the tone with your team and define skill from a systemic and improvement standpoint rather than merely a technical one.

Check out the books in the far right column on this blog to find a handy DOJO compendium to get you started on this journey.  If you are serious about improving IT flow, reaping the drastic cost savings, increases in project execution and infrastructure reliability that result, feel free to contact me about mentoring and staff coaching.  It really does make a huge difference!

If you have stumbled upon a nugget on your journey please let me know I am @kevinbehr on Twitter - join the conversation!

*Put down the Blackberry. Step away from the Blackberry please.”

When I read this article about Obama’s Blackberry use, I rolled my eyes at some of the intellectual stretches it was taking. While I agree with the premise and I do certainly understand the Blackberry-jones (nervous separation anxiety and the compulsion to thumb it when the little red light blinks) premise, I was far more interested in the work that Gloria Mark was engaged in.

“When Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, shadowed employees at two high-tech firms, she found that the average worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and asked to do something else. IT workers have it worse, switching attention every three minutes, on average.”  - Newsweek Magazine, 2/16/09

Over the last ten years, Gene Kim and I have been inside of and benchmarked hundreds of IT organizations, conducted numerous research studies and written a LOT about this very topic of unplanned work. We have come to believe that, largely, IT management as a whole has not built an effective system for “Doing IT.”  This study from the University of California dovetails with some of our findings from benchmarking nearly 1000 IT organizations.

Namely, the first finding that Unplanned Work, which by definition is the IT equivalent of task assignment by drive-by-shooting (fire-fighting outages, urgent security patching or compliance related work, essentially anything that takes a worker off of the planned task list of things that are important) is virtually non-existent in high performing shops compared to everyone else.  This is evident both by the low amount of it (expressed as a percentage of labor opex often as low as five to ten percent, compared to the rest at twenty to fifty percent of labor opex lost to heat) and by the advantage high performers have over everyone else in project execution. High performers get up to 8X the projects done, 14-16x times the infrastructure changes with one-half the change failure rate.  Also, their mean time to repair an outage is as low as 1/10 the time of low performers!  All of this creates higher availability and the ability to execute more projects in a more controlled manor with less negative business impact.

Oh yeah, did I mention that they do this with as little as 1/4 of the system administrator staff when compared to low performers?

By building an effective execution flow system it is not only possible, it is probable that you will outperform your competitors and actually help your company meet its goals.

Over the last ten years Gene and I have learned:

1.       Constant fire-fighting  and uncontrolled change weakens infrastructure and creates security problems,

2.       The hero culture that ensues accelerates the rate of outage entropy because little information and visibility in to the known good state exists for others to draw on,

3.       Your best and most talented people are stuck on the fire-fighting line instead of solving business problems,

4.       Your ability to demonstrate proof of compliance diminishes with the more outages you have,

5.       More fire-fighting = less project and planned work = less credibility with business peers = shadow IT = failure,

6.       This can all be fixed by building a system based on Flow and controls.  No, I am not speaking of a never-ending-death-march of process analysts and skies darkened by consultants. I am talking about building a deliberate discovery based system that illuminates what is actually happening versus obscuring it. This type of system learns from every mistake and seldom repeats the mistakes made in the past.

Sound interesting?  If this is the direction your organization wants to move - Dramatically Lower Cost structures, Drastically Increased Project Delivery capability, and Rock Solid Reliability, then contact me here and let’s talk about how we can help!

We are currently doing just this for some of the most advanced and largest IT operations in existence today.

You can download the PDF of the article here.  This is a great overview of Visible Ops for execs.  If you want to talk to your boss about adopting Visible Ops, ITIL or just some of the concepts in the book. This document is nice and portable and has pretty colors (hint: execs love color).

If you are interested in improving your IT organization’s ability to focus on and complete planned work, such as projects and proactive info sec work, feel free to contact me here to find out about the workshops, benchmarking and briefings I do to help get folks started!

George Spafford has built an amazing resource with his Yahoo news group.  Read by executives in; audit, IT managemnt, the C-suite and consultants world-wide he provides some great information and links thought-provoking articles.  Highly recommended!

Mich Kabay wrote a very nice review of Visible Ops for Network World. 

He also wrote a great review of Visible Ops Security edition.

I arrived at the boardroom five minutes early so I could get my thoughts together after the nearly 2 hour barrage of background information from Rob.  A week prior I had also asked him to account for each IT department’s workload across projects and support related activity.  While doing so, he had gathered some very interesting data.  From the budget worksheets I pulled a list of approved and funded IT capital projects, of which there were nearly forty, but the list of project activity from the IT team was alarming. If I was reading this right there must be over a hundred IT projects in progress.  My mind was instantly flooded with synapses. Where were these projects coming from?

I thought that having forty capital projects was overload, but over a hundred was just ridiculous.  I now had proof of some serious shadow IT going on.  The question wasn’t who in the boardroom was guilty, but rather, with this number, who was innocent! I started to make tick marks against projects outside of the approved list that were easily attributable to marketing, finance or operations just so I would have an idea of who the worst offenders were.  I did this until the room began to fill with my peers. 

We were all waiting on Paul, our CEO, when I overheard our CMO, Skip Sorrenson, complain about IT being in the way of his marketing data warehouse project. He wanted to hire new staff but I had told HR to hold off on any new IT hires until I could figure out who and what were needed.  According to Rob, this project had been a money pit since day one and had sucked up millions of dollars in capital and had distracted at least a dozen team members between marketing and IT for over five years.  The kicker was that it had delivered zero value to the company.  I knew this was a touchy subject with all and that I would need to get my arms around this project and rescue it fast.

“Ok everyone, sorry to keep you waiting, my call with the street went a little over.  I had to explain our crazy high EBITDA again for the third quarter in row. Thanks Skip.” He joked dryly to a chuckling-murmur in the room. Skip was obviously a rising star in the company and due to his marketing prowess we were enjoying unprecedented quarter over quarter profits.

I heard the conference room door close and noticed my Deputy CIO slip into a chair along the wall in the back of the boardroom.  I told him that he should be here in case I needed backup and to document any deliverables I might get assigned.

“None of us has any time to waste, so let’s talk about IT projects.  Everyone here knows Phil, our interim CIO, by now.  Phil I know you haven’t had much time but can you give us an update on the major capital projects?  I would like to know, first of all, how much of your capital allotment budget has been spent, where the completion status is for the projects, and then answer any questions anyone else might have.”

“Sounds reasonable” I replied confidently, although not sure why.

“Well it is now the third quarter and we have spent less than 25% of our capital budget.  I have some serious questions about the way IT projects are run and why our completion rate is so low. I certainly understand the concerns, regarding IT project effectiveness that many of you raised during my one on one interviews with you a few weeks ago.

It seems that we have far too many IT project planes taking off and landing with little to zero tower oversight. I compiled a list of 39 approved capital projects, most of which are major, by the way. I then sent Rob McNunzio on a bit of a skunk works project to see what my team was actually working on. The results are preliminary but it looks as if the actively worked project list numbers well over 100.”

*Crickets*

I made stern eye contact with all of my peers shooting the I-know-you-are-killing us-all look, followed by a smile.

“Truthfully I was going to come to you today and say that this list of 39 capital projects needs to be prioritized and paired down to 10 major projects and 5 mid size projects just to get things under some sort of control. But after finding out about over 100 projects being active I would say we have a fundamental problem here, and by here I mean in this room.”

I had just thrown down in my first senior leadership team meeting.  I had the worst performing department in terms of credibility and satisfaction ratings, I was in my post less than a week, my department was in the way of company strategy execution, and I had just went type-a on a bunch of sharks…in the shark tank.