OPS 3: How does your organizational culture support your business outcomes?
Provide support for your team members so that they can be more effective in taking action and supporting your business outcome.
Best Practices:
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Executive Sponsorship: Senior leadership clearly sets expectations for the organization and evaluates success. Senior leadership is the sponsor, advocate, and driver for the adoption of best practices and evolution of the organization
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Team members are empowered to take action when outcomes are at risk: The workload owner has defined guidance and scope empowering team members to respond when outcomes are at risk. Escalation mechanisms are used to get direction when events are outside of the defined scope.
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Escalation is encouraged: Team members have mechanisms and are encouraged to escalate concerns to decision makers and stakeholders if they believe outcomes are at risk. Escalation should be performed early and often so that risks can be identified, and prevented from causing incidents.
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Communications are timely, clear, and actionable: Mechanisms exist and are used to provide timely notice to team members of known risks and planned events. Necessary context, details, and time (when possible) are provided to support determining if action is necessary, what action is required, and to take action in a timely manner. For example, providing notice of software vulnerabilities so that patching can be expedited, or providing notice of planned sales promotions so that a change freeze can be implemented to avoid the risk of service disruption.
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Experimentation is encouraged: Experimentation accelerates learning and keeps team members interested and engaged. An undesired result is a successful experiment that has identified a path that will not lead to success. Team members are not punished for successful experiments with undesired results. Experimentation is required for innovation to happen and turn ideas into outcomes.
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Team members are enabled and encouraged to maintain and grow their skill sets: Teams must grow their skill sets to adopt new technologies, and to support changes in demand and responsibilities in support of your workloads. Growth of skills in new technologies is frequently a source of team member satisfaction and supports innovation. Support your team members’ pursuit and maintenance of industry certifications that validate and acknowledge their growing skills. Cross train to promote knowledge transfer and reduce the risk of significant impact when you lose skilled and experienced team members with institutional knowledge. Provide dedicated structured time for learning.
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Resource teams appropriately: Maintain team member capacity, and provide tools and resources, to support your workload needs. Overtasking team members increases the risk of incidents resulting from human error. Investments in tools and resources (for example, providing automation for frequently executed activities) can scale the effectiveness of your team, enabling them to support additional activities.
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Diverse opinions are encouraged and sought within and across teams: Leverage cross-organizational diversity to seek multiple unique perspectives. Use this perspective to increase innovation, challenge your assumptions, and reduce the risk of confirmation bias. Grow inclusion, diversity, and accessibility within your teams to gain beneficial perspectives.
Improvement Plan
Executive Sponsorship
- Set expectations: Define and publish goals for your organizations including how they will be measured.
- Track achievement of goals: Measure the incremental achievement of goals regularly and share the results so that appropriate action can be taken if outcomes are at risk.
- Provide the resources necessary to achieve your goals: Regularly review if resources are still appropriate, of if additional resources are needed based on: new information, changes to goals, responsibilities, or your business environment.
- Advocate for your teams: Remain engaged with your teams so that you understand how they are doing and if there are external factors affecting them. When your teams are impacted by external factors, reevaluate goals and adjust targets as appropriate. Identify obstacles that are impeding your teams progress. Act on behalf of your teams to help address obstacles and remove unnecessary burdens.
- Be a driver for adoption of best practices: Acknowledge best practices that have provide quantifiable benefits and recognize the creators and adopters. Encourage further adoption to magnify the benefits achieved.
- Be a driver for evolution of for your teams: Create a culture of continual improvement. Encourage both personal and organizational growth and development. Provide long term targets to strive for that will require incremental achievement over time. Adjust this vision to compliment your needs, business goals, and business environment as they change.
Team members are empowered to take action when outcomes are at risk
- Give your team members opportunity to practice the skills necessary to respond: Provide alternative safe environments where processes and procedures can be tested and trained upon safely. Perform gamedays to allow team members to gain experience responding to real world incidents in simulated and safe environments.
- Define and acknowledge team members' authority to take action: Specifically define team members authority to take action by assigning permissions and access to the workloads and components they support. Acknowledge that they are empowered to take action when outcomes are at risk.
Escalation is encouraged
- Have a mechanism for escalation: Have documented procedures defining when and how escalation should occur. Document the series of people with increasing authority to take action or approve action and their contact information. Escalation should continue until the team member is satisfied they have handed off the risk to a person able to address it, or they have contacted the person who owns the risk and liability for the operation of the workload. It is that person who ultimately owns all decisions with respect to their workload. Escalations should include the nature of the risk, the criticality of the workload, who is impacted, what the impact is, and the urgency, that is, when is the impact expected.
- Protect employees who escalate: Have policy that protects team members from retribution if they escalate around a non responsive decision make or stakeholder. Have mechanisms in place to identify if this is occurring and respond appropriately.
Communications are timely, clear, and actionable
- Document planned activities on a change calendar and provide notifications: Provide an accessible source of information where planned events can be discovered. Provide notifications of planned events from the same system.
- Track events and activity that may have an impact on your workload: Monitoring vulnerability notifications and patch information to understand vulnerabilities in the wild and potential risks associated to your workload components. Provide notification to team members so that they can take action.
Experimentation is encouraged
- Experiment with a variety of technologies: Encourage experimentation with technologies that may have applicability now or in the future to the achievement of your business outcomes. This knowledge may inform future innovation.
- Experiment with a goal in mind: Encourage experimentation with specific goals for team members to reach for, or with technologies that may have applicability in the near future. This knowledge may inform your innovation.
- Provide structured time to experiment: Dedicate specific times when team members can be free of their normal responsibilities, so that they can focus on their experiments.
- Provide the resources to support experimentation: Fund the resources required to conduct experiments (for example, software, or cloud resources).
- Acknowledge success: Recognize the value yielded by experimentation. Understand that experiments with undesired outcomes are successful and have identified a path that will not lead to success. Team members are not punished for undesired outcomes from experiments.
Team members are enabled and encouraged to maintain and grow their skill sets
- Provide resources for education: Provided dedicated structured time, access to training materials, lab resources, and support participation in conferences and professional organizations that provide opportunities for learning from both educators and peers. Provide junior team members' access to senior team members as mentors or allow them to shadow their work and be exposed to their methods and skills. Encourage learning about content not directly related to work in order to have a broader perspective.
- Team education and cross-team engagement: Plan for the continuing education needs of your team members. Provide opportunities for team members to join other teams (temporarily or permanently) to share skills and best practices benefiting your entire organization
- Support pursuit and maintenance of industry certifications: Support your team members acquiring and maintaining industry certifications that validate what they have learned, and acknowledge their accomplishments.
Resource teams appropriately
- Understand team performance: Measure the achievement of operational outcomes and the development of assets by your teams. Track changes in output and error rate over time. Engage with teams to understand the work related challenges that impact them (for example, increasing responsibilities, changes in technology, loss of personnel, or increase in customers supported).
- Understand impacts on team performance: Remain engaged with your teams so that you understand how they are doing and if there are external factors affecting them. When your teams are impacted by external factors, reevaluate goals and adjust targets as appropriate. Identify obstacles that are impeding your teams progress. Act on behalf of your teams to help address obstacles and remove unnecessary burdens.
- Provide the resources necessary for teams to be successful: Regularly review if resources are still appropriate, of if additional resources are needed, and make appropriate adjustments to support teams.
Diverse opinions are encouraged and sought within and across teams
- Expand roles and responsibilities: Provide opportunity for team members to take on roles that they might not otherwise. They will gain experience and perspective from the role, and from interactions with new team members with whom they might not otherwise interact. They will bring their experience and perspective to the new role and team members they interact with. As perspective increases additional business opportunities may emerge, or new opportunities for improvement may be identified. Have members within a team take turns at common tasks that others typically perform to understand the demands and impact of performing them.
- Provide a safe and welcoming environment: Have policy and controls that protect team members' mental and physical safety within your organization. Team members should be able to interact without fear of reprisal. When team members feel safe and welcome they are more likely to be engaged and productive. The more diverse your organization the better your understanding can be of the people you support including your customers. When your team members are comfortable, feel free to speak, and are confident they will be heard, they are more likely to share valuable insights (for example, marketing opportunities, accessibility needs, unserved market segments, unacknowledged risks in your environment).
- Enable team members to participate fully: Provide the resources necessary for your employees to participate fully in all work related activities. Team members that face daily challenges have developed skills for working around them. These uniquely developed skills can provide significant benefit to your organization. Supporting team members with necessary accommodations will increase the benefits you can receive from their contributions.