Evolving Your Operations

You should keep improving your operations over time. Ideally, you want to introduce small incremental changes based on the lessons learned in your operation activities. Additionally, you also want to measure the success of such changes to determine whether they brought the expected benefits.

First, you must develop a plan to allocate time to analyze your operations activities and failures, experiment with new ideas, and make improvements. You should evaluate and prioritize opportunities for improvement on a regular basis and focus your efforts on where they can provide the greatest benefits. Note that there might be opportunities to improve in all your environments (not only production but also maybe development, testing, and user acceptance). It is also paramount to learn from failures and to share the lessons learned with the engineering community in your organization, as part of the continuous improvement process.

Second, it is important to perform...