Introduction to NonStop Operations Management

Operations Management and Continuous
Improvement
Introduction to NonStop Operations Management–125507
13-5
Step 1—Assessing Your Environment
Step 1—Assessing Your Environment
Assess the current status of your operations environment, processes, and tools. This step
is critical. If you introduce changes without having a clear view of the strengths and
weaknesses of your current environment, you could create unanticipated problems. For
example, installing an automated operations product too early in the improvement
program could degrade problem recovery instead of improving it.
Assessing your environment will:
•
Show you how your organization actually works.
•
Identify major problems and areas where improvement actions will be most
productive.
•
Establish a clear picture of your improvement goals as well as guide the direction of
your improvement program.
•
Establish a way to gauge the progress of your improvement program.
Using the maturity framework, described earlier in this section, can help you assess the
current status of your operations management processes.
Step 2—Developing a Vision
Develop a vision of the operations management processes you want to have in place by
establishing goals and objectives that fulfill the service-level agreements of your
organization.
For example, some of your goals might be to:
•
Improve the quality of end-user services. You may have to lower the number of
application outages and reduce recovery time to improve the availability of the
applications.
•
Reduce cost of operations and improve operator productivity. You might have to
replace current technology with more state-of-the-art tools.
Level 5 The staff continuously measures, analyzes, and improves its operations
management processes to optimize productivity and minimize the risk of down
time.
The operations staff can plan for and incorporate new procedures and
technologies with little risk, because it has established methods for managing and
improving processes.
Managers understand where help is needed and how best to provide the
operations staff with the support it requires.
The staff understands its work performance, learns from its experiences, and uses
this knowledge to make improvements.
Table 13-1. The Maturity Framework (page 2 of 2)
Maturity
Level Characteristics