Operations

Two Strong Foundations

Operations are founded on predictability and responsiveness. What you do should be predictable, and you should be responsive when it didn’t turn out as predicted.

The more you drill predictability, the less often you will need your responsiveness. Predictability is preferred. It generally costs less day to day, and gives a better customer experience.

Responsiveness is incident handling - rescuing service or late-night fixes. While you have to be able to do these things, they typically result from having to fix a bad customer experience. It is rarely desirable, but it beats being unresponsive.

In between these two is predictable response. That is where you, as an organisation, can be relied on to treat problems seriously and promptly. That is your service desk, your SRE team, and your devs supporting their code.

How We Get You There

We guide you to predictable operations, but if your operations are neither predictable nor well responded to, you will need to learn responsiveness first.

Knowing what to do about a problem begins with knowing about a problem. So we start with a place to collect user feedback, and provide some help. We help you create monitoring to provide detailed knowledge of how your systems run. We teach you how to improve logging and other telemetry to understand the minutiae of any part of your systems.

Once these foundations are in place, we guide you to a better pattern of responses. Well informed incident response, and a roadmap of operational improvements to make, begins the path to predictability.

This Is a Core Expertise at Firmamentum

With those foundations, we can construct a predictable operational path. Operations should not be dramatic. Almost all of the best operational improvements can be described as drama reduction.

Then we apply appropriate change control. That works best with asset management in place, and requires well-defined ownership of all systems. We build up knowledge base items for each system.

This is the outline of how Firmamentum can help you in operations.