OPS 2: How do you structure your organization to support your business outcomes?
Your teams must understand their part in achieving business outcomes. Teams need to understand their roles in the success of other teams, the role of other teams in their success, and have shared goals. Understanding responsibility, ownership, how decisions are made, and who has authority to make decisions will help focus efforts and maximize the benefits from your teams.
Best Practices:
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Resources have identified owners: Understand who has ownership of each application, workload, platform, and infrastructure component, what business value is provided by that component, and why that ownership exists. Understanding the business value of these individual components and how they support business outcomes informs the processes and procedures applied against them.
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Processes and procedures have identified owners: Understand who has ownership of the definition of individual processes and procedures, why those specific process and procedures are used, and why that ownership exists. Understanding the reasons that specific processes and procedures are used enables identification of improvement opportunities.
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Operations activities have identified owners responsible for their performance: Understand who has responsibility to perform specific activities on defined workloads and why that responsibility exists. Understanding who has responsibility to perform activities informs who will conduct the activity, validate the result, and provide feedback to the owner of the activity.
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Team members know what they are responsible for: Understanding the responsibilities of your role and how you contribute to business outcomes informs the prioritization of your tasks and why your role is important. This enables team members to recognize needs and respond appropriately.
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Mechanisms exist to identify responsibility and ownership: Where no individual or team is identified, there are defined escalation paths to someone with the authority to assign ownership or plan for that need to be addressed.
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Mechanisms exist to request additions, changes, and exceptions: You are able to make requests to owners of processes, procedures, and resources. Make informed decisions to approve requests where viable and determined to be appropriate after an evaluation of benefits and risks.
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Responsibilities between teams are predefined or negotiated: There are defined or negotiated agreements between teams describing how they work with and support each other (for example, response times, service level objectives, or service level agreements). Understanding the impact of the teams’ work on business outcomes, and the outcomes of other teams and organizations, informs the prioritization of their tasks and enables them to respond appropriately.
Improvement Plan
Resources have identified owners
- Define forms of ownership and how they are assigned: Ownership may have multiple definitions in your organization with different uses cases. You may wish to define a "workload owner" as the individual who owns the risk and liability for the operation of a workload, and whom ultimately has authority to make decisions about the workload. You may wish to define ownership in terms of financial or administrative responsibility where ownership rolls up to a parent organization. A developer may be the owner of their development environment and be responsible for incidents that its operation causes. Their product lead may own responsibility for the financial costs associated to the operation of their development environments.
- Define who owns an organization, account, collection of resources, or individual components: Define and record ownership in an appropriately accessible location organized to support discovery. Update definitions and ownership details as they change.
- Capture ownership in the metadata for the resources: Capture resource ownership using metadata such as tags or resource groups, specifying ownership and contact information. Use AWS Organizations to structure accounts and ensure ownership and contact information are captured.
Processes and procedures have identified owners
- Identify process and procedures: Identify the operations activities conducted in support of your workloads. Document these activities in a discoverable location.
- Define who owns the definition of a process or procedure: Uniquely identify the individual or team responsible for the specification of an activity. They are responsible to ensure it can be successfully performed by an adequately skilled team member with the correct permissions, access, and tools. If there are issues with performing that activity, the team members performing it are responsible to provide the detailed feedback necessary for the activitiy to be improved.
- Capture ownership in the metadata of the activity artifact: Procedures automated in services like AWS Systems Manager, through documents, and AWS Lambda, as functions, support capturing metadata information as tags. Capture resource ownership using tags or resource groups, specifying ownership and contact information. Use AWS Organizations to create tagging polices and ensure ownership and contact information are captured.
Operations activities have identified owners responsible for their performance
- Identify process and procedures: Identify the operations activities conducted in support of your workloads. Document these activities in a discoverable location.
- Define who is responsible to perform each activity: Identify the team responsible for an activity. Ensure they have the details of the activity, and the necessary skills and correct permissions, access, and tools to perform the activity. They must understand the condition under which it is to be perform (for example, on an event or schedule). Make this information discoverable so that members of your organization can identify who they need to contact, team or individual, for specific needs.
Team members know what they are responsible for
Mechanisms exist to identify responsibility and ownership
Mechanisms exist to request additions, changes, and exceptions
Responsibilities between teams are predefined or negotiated