4 Steps to Stop Fighting Fires and Start Leading: Introduction

Last week, I wrote a post about the tendency of many technology organizations to operate in a perpetual fire fighting mode. This is a reactive and inefficient way to operate, and certainly does not require much leadership skill.

Believe it or not, there really is a better way. How would you like to:

Improve reliability and increase availability
Improve your change success score
Improve integration between operations and security
Become compliant and maintain compliance with laws and regulations relevant to your business
Reduce time spent on unplanned work

According to studies conducted by the authors of The Visible Ops Handbook, all of these are benefits of using the ITIL framework (p 13-14). I can personally vouch for the benefits of following the 4 steps outlined in the handbook, as my department has seen remarkable improvements in each category listed above.

Cultural Change is Required

Getting out of fire fighting mode requires a change in culture. Cultural changes can be difficult and scary, but they do not have to be.

In my case, I worked with my people to identify pain points in our operations and explained that we could move from a reactive culture requiring a lot of unplanned work and after-hours support to one of relative calm . This was something that was important to my folks, so I immediately had their buy-in.

I bought a copy of The Visible Ops Handbook for each person and we reviewed a new chapter during our weekly staff meeting. We shared examples from our own experiences that reinforced what the authors said about change management, unplanned work and the root causes of outages. This strengthened their buy-in. After reading the book, we created a plan based on the 4 steps and then we executed that plan.

By going through this process as a group, developing new policies and processes, means that we all own the change and we all know what is expected. There is no argument about following policy or procedure, because we all had a hand in creating them.

Actual Results of Visible Ops

The results have been impressive: 70% reduction in outage minutes, 50% reduction in MTTR, unplanned work has been cut in half and we’ve nearly doubled our change success score. Now, we go home at night and don’t worry about getting called about an outage or to deal with fixing a failed change. Things still break or go wrong from time to time, but they do so far less frequently and it takes far less time to restore our services. In other words, we met the business and personal goals we set for ourselves.

Want to learn more? Come back next week when we will begin with step one: Stabilize the Patient and Modify First Response.