Organization

Why is the Organization best practice area important?

You need to understand your organization's priorities, your organizational structure, and how your organization supports your team members so that they can support business outcomes.

• Organization priorities - There needs to be common understanding across your organization of the business value of your workload and the role of each team in supporting it. Teams need to have shared business goals to set the priorities that will enable business success.
• Operational model - Teams need to understand their roles in the success of other teams, and the role of other teams in their success. Understanding responsability and ownership will help focus efforts and maximize the benefits of those efforts.
• Organization culture - Your organization needs to provide support for team members so that they can be more effective in taking and supporting the business outcomes.

Prepare

Why is the Prepare best practice area important?

To prepare for Operational Excellence, you have to understand your workloads and their expected behaviors. You will then be able to design them to provide insight into their status, and build the procedures to support them. The Prepare best parctice area focuses on design telemetry, improving flow, mitigating deployments risks, and understanding operational readiness.

• Design telemetry - It is important to ensure the workload provides the information necessary (for example, metrics, logs, events, and traces) for you to understand its internal state across all its components.
• Improve flow - You need to emphazise practices that accelerate the velocity of beneficial changes towards production, that limit the issues that move forward, and that enable identifying and fixing issues before they can make it to production.
• Mitigate deployment risks - It is important that you adopt approaches that allow you quickly identify quality and rapidly recover from changes that do not have desired outcomes. Implement engineering practices that support reducing the number of defects and that enable quick and safe fixes.
• Operational readiness - It is essential to understand how ready the workload is to enter production and how ready your teams are to support it. By understanding the risks of operating the workload in production, you can make an informed decision about whether to do so.

Operate

Why is the Operate best practice area important?

You need to know how to operate your wokloads and understand the health of your workload and operations activities. Through this understanding, you can identify when organizational and business outcomes are at risk and respond appropiately.

Evolve

Why the Evolve best practice area important?

You need to have a process for continuous improvement of both your workload and your operations activities. This includes implementing feedback loops, learning from experience, making improvements, and sharing what is learned to benefit your entire organization.