Operate Phase Workflow
The following diagram demonstrates the relationship between the SMFs and management reviews in the Operate Phase. The SMFs in the phase are interdependent, but not sequential. The Operate SMF addresses the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks required to maintain an IT service: Service Monitoring and Control addresses the ongoing health monitoring of IT services and components; Customer Service describes how users ask for services or file incidents about those services already in use; and Problem Management focuses on how to resolve complex problems that may be beyond the scope of Incident Resolution requests.
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Figure 2. The Operate Phase workflow
Service Management Functions (SMFs) Within the Operate Phase
To help IT professionals effectively plan and optimize an IT strategy, MOF offers service management functions (SMFs) that define the processes, people, and activities required to align IT services to the requirements of the business. SMFs identify and describe the primary activities that IT professionals perform within the various phases of the IT service lifecycle. Although each SMF can be thought of and used as a stand-alone set of processes, it is when they are combined that they most effectively ensure that service delivery is complete and at the desired quality and risk levels.
The following table identifies the SMFs that support the achievement of these objectives within the Operate Phase.
Table 1. Operate Phase SMFs
SMF
Deliverable/Purpose
Outcomes
Operations
Deliverable: Operations guide
Purpose:
- Ensure that the work required to successfully operate IT services has been identified and described
- Free up time for the operations staff by reducing reactive work
- Minimize service disruptions and downtime
- Execute recurring IT operations work effectively and efficiently
- Improved efficiency of IT staff
- Increased IT service availability
- Improved operations of new/changed IT services
- Reduction of reactive work
Service Monitoring and Control
Deliverable: IT health monitoring data
Purpose:
- Observe the health of IT services
- Initiate remedial actions to minimize the impact of service incidents and system events
- Improved overall availability of services
- Reduced number of SLA and OLA breaches
- Improved understanding of the infrastructure components responsible for delivery of the service
- Improvement in user satisfaction with the service
- Quicker and more effective responses to service incidents
Customer Service
Deliverable: Effective user service
Purpose:
- Provide a positive experience to the users of a service provider
- Address complaints or issues
- Maintained levels of business productivity
- Increased value added by IT
- Improved business functionality, competitiveness, and efficiency
Problem Management
Deliverable: Effective problem resolution process
Purpose:
- Provide root cause analysis to find problems
- Predict future problems
- Reduced number of unassigned problems, and increased number of problems assigned to an owner
- Reduced number of incidents and problems that occur, and lessened impact of those that do occur
- Increased number of workarounds and permanent solutions to identified problems
- More problems resolved earlier or avoided entirely
The SMFs in this phase do not have to be used sequentially, but they do possess a natural order:
- Operations occurs first because it focuses on how to determine what the daily, weekly, monthly, and as-needed tasks are for properly maintaining a deployed IT service. Operations also describes how to carry out those tasks.
- Service Monitoring and Control occurs next because its focus is on the health of the deployed IT services. This SMF proactively looks for evidence of things not operating according to expectations.
- Customer Service focuses on fixing those things that go wrong either by an automatic request to fix a problem identified through Service Monitoring and Control or through an end-user request. It also focuses on providing new and existing services.
- Finally, Problem Management focuses on reducing the occurrence of failures with IT services.
Each of these SMFs is documented in its own guide:
- Operations Management Service Management Function
- Service Monitoring and Control Service Management Function
- Customer Service Management Function
- Problem Management Service Management Function
Management Review for the Phase
Management is responsible for establishing goals, evaluating progress, and ensuring results. In part, governance consists of the decision-making processes (controls) that help management fulfill this responsibility. Each phase of the IT service lifecycle has one or more management reviews (MRs) that function as management controls. This means that the right people are brought together, at the right time, with the right information to make management decisions. Every phase has different management objectives, so each phase has uniquely focused MRs with appropriate stakeholders, required decisions, and the type of data needed to make well-informed and fully weighed decisions.
The MR for the Operate Phase is a periodic review that is key to the effective maintenance, monitoring, and support of IT services. That review—the Operational Health Review—provides a structure for reviewing and analyzing results and taking action to improve performance. It takes place at the end of the Operate Phase and is primarily concerned with assessing the effectiveness of an organization’s internal operating processes. It is intended to be scheduled on a regular basis, but may be called into session on an emergency basis. The goal is to ensure that operations in the production environment are continuously monitored and measured against previously set indicators.
These indicators consist primarily of performance measurements that have been formally documented in operating level agreements (OLAs), service level agreements (SLAs), or contracts that Service Level Management helps formulate. The OHR is not limited to review of only OLA/SLA-related metrics, however. It should also evaluate other business and operational indicators that will assist senior management in measuring the overall health of the production computing environment.
Items to evaluate:
- IT staff performance
- Operational efficiency
- Personnel skills and competencies
- OLA-defined targets and metrics
- SLA-defined targets and metrics
- Contractual targets and metrics
- Customer satisfaction
- Costs
The key stakeholders and decision makers who participate in the OHR meeting include:
- The IT operations management team.
- The service managers responsible for the services being delivered.
- Managers from platform or technology-specific teams (such as network administration, messaging, data lifecycle management).
- Event monitoring team (also known as bridge or command center).
- Storage management, backup, and recovery team.
- Security administration team.
- Delivery representation (development, test).
- Customer representation.
- User representation.
- Partner representation.
Table 2. Components of the Operational Health Management Review
Inputs
Analyses
Decisions
Outputs
- OLA and SLA documents
- OLA and SLA performance reports
- Operational guides and solution specifications
- Action items, accountabilities, and minutes from previous OHRs
- Customer satisfaction information
- Financial performance information
- Risk management and current issues
- Basic human resources metrics and organizational health indicators
- Operations process maturity metrics
- Ongoing or emerging issues reflected in review of action items and previous minutes
- Identify OLA or SLA performance that is outside of established tolerance levels
- Trends in customer satisfaction
- Financial performance overall and in specific categories
- Changes in risk assessments, tolerance boundaries, compliance violations
- Organizational health trends
- Operational maturity compared to desired state
- Upcoming changes that may impact operations
- Immediate service improvement actions
- Request for change to:
- OLA
- SLA
- Technical change
- Procedural change
- Resource change
- Identify process or procedural changes
- Need for resources or training
- Need for funding changes
- Minutes of this MR and associated actions and accountabilities
- Requests for changes to services
- Requests for changes to infrastructure and configuration
- Request for changes to procedures
- Requests for changes to documentation
- Requests for changes to contracts or agreements
- Requests for formal service improvement plans
- Requests for resources with desired capabilities or for training
- Requests to modify funding
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