Key Considerations for IT Operational Service Best Practices

What does it mean to be operationally effective? The answer to this question is: It depends! In reality, it is based on many factors, but it all comes down to running and managing a solution during and after it is done. So, in this context, does “it” really mean “information technology” (IT) or does it mean just “it” – your system? We’ll let you decide as you read this chapter and see that without correct operational best practices IT devolves into a thing (“it”) that is not reliable, available, scalable, or performant.

With Agile and Lean development methodologies, that state of being done may never really occur. Alternatively, a product’s stage of being done may be attained only after it is ascribed a versioned release number and made generally available within one pass through the cycle. How IT gets done is iteratively defined by these cycles...