Almost 80% of outages are self-inflicted. The first step is to control risky changes and reduce MTTR by addressing how changes are managed and how problems are resolved.

Often, infrastructure exists that cannot be repeatedly replicated. In this step, we inventory assets, configurations and services, to identify those with the lowest change success rates, highest MTTR and highest business downtime costs.

The highest return on investment is implementing effective release management processes. This step creates repeatable builds for the most critical assets and services, to make it “cheaper to rebuild than to repair.”

The previous steps have progressively built a closed-loop between the Release, Control and Resolution processes. This step implements metrics to allow continuous improvement of all of these process areas, to best ensure that business objectives are met.

“Visible Ops describes four steps to control an IT environment. The unassailable logic behind these steps is based on the practical experience of the authors, Gene Kim and Kevin Behr. These same steps can easily be mapped to any maturity model and Visible Ops hence describes a roadmap to maturity.

This book is released from IT Process Institute (ITPI). ITPI is an independent research organization that exists to support the membership of IT operations, security, and audit professionals. Our mission is to identify practices that are proven to improve the performance of IT organizations.