Introduction
Delivering on-demand services well is never easy. Your success hinges on having both the capability and capacity to deliver what your customer needs while doing so at high speed with the consistency, reliability, security, privacy, and cost effectiveness that they expect. This is just as true whether you are providing an IT service or a more traditional courier or electric utility service.
However, unlike more traditional services, IT service providers are far less restricted by organizational size or physical location. With so many quickly deployable tools and cloud capabilities available, even the smallest IT service providers can now instantly scale to address nearly any identified market need globally.
Where IT service delivery providers do struggle is predictably and reliably delivering services that match customer expectations. This, of course, matters. No one wants the frustration and disappointment of a service that falls short of what is needed. What makes this particularly frustrating is that such shortfalls are not caused by misunderstanding the market need or the functionality customers are looking for. If anything, IT is flooded by tools and techniques that allow businesses to analyze and validate ideas quickly. Instead, the problems arise from awareness gaps caused by the way organizations deliver and manage the services themselves.
As IT service stacks grow in complexity, it becomes far more difficult to determine, let alone ensure, that the dynamics between service components and the delivery ecosystem match what the customer expected. Rather than put measures in place to improve their awareness and understanding of these dynamics, delivery teams have focused on other factors like delivering more faster, using the latest cloud technologies and architectural approaches, or adopting the process or methodology most in fashion. Unfortunately, in the process the delivery teams unknowingly create further disconnects that fragment the information flow and context necessary to understand those dynamics.
As the resulting gap between what delivery teams believe they are providing and what is actually delivered grows, the team’s ability to maintain sufficient context to make effective decisions steadily degrades. Even when disconnects are found, organizations often double down on more processes and misunderstood tooling that do little to effectively bridge the gaps. This creates a vicious loop that creates more frustration as the team drifts further away from being able to deliver to meet customer expectations.
Learning How to See
It is not inevitable that delivery teams have to fall into such a dysfunctional spiral. To break the cycle, you first need to understand the many ways you can lose your situational awareness, from deeply entrenched bad habits that fragment information flow to biases and perceptions that distort your understanding of a situation and what is important. Only then can you begin to put measures in place to counteract these tendencies and improve everyone’s situational awareness.
Sharpening your situational awareness is like gaining a new sense or superpower you never knew you had. I like to think of it as learning how to see.
The primary objective of this book is to help you on that journey so that you and your organization can close the awareness gap and deliver services that your customers can use to reach their target outcomes. This book is geared primarily for two audiences. The first comprises the individual contributors, like software developers and IT Operations staff, who are in the trenches delivering the services. The other key audience comprises the managers and leaders who are responsible for building and directing those delivery teams.
For individual contributors the journey begins by looking at the delivery process itself. The first step is how you determine the objective of the work you are performing. Can it be used to check how well what is delivered aligns with the target outcomes of the customer, or are the measures more output-focused, such as the number of features or service uptime? Then there are the ways you acquire, understand, learn, and improve your ability to deliver. There are a number of misperceptions that inject flaws into our decision making, and ultimately the effectiveness of our actions.
To break this cycle, in this book you will find various techniques to help you measure and improve your situational awareness and the quality of information flow across your organization so that you are able to make better delivery decisions that move your services closer toward meeting your customer’s target outcomes. Along the way many of the excuses people make for not changing their behavior and way of working, from managing work to governance procedures, will be debunked so that you and the team can continue to make progress.
Here, managers and delivery leadership will find strategies to help delivery teams spot and eliminate awareness gaps and misalignments that hinder effective delivery. This begins by identifying the various problems that arise from many of the management styles, requirements management techniques, processes, communication styles, and incentive structures that have traditionally been relied upon to direct and control people. These lead to poor decision making, conflict, reduced learning and improvement, and ultimately failure to deliver in a way that meets customer expectations. You will also learn about the power of Mission Command, as well as ways to communicate, inspire, and support the members of your team to effectively deliver to the organization’s vision and the outcomes customers are trying to achieve.
Those who do not fit neatly in one of the two audiences described likely will also find value within these pages. For example, you might uncover and correct your own misperceptions about service delivery. This can help you better understand and more effectively interact with service delivery teams.
The thinking and techniques in this book are part of the larger Mobius outcome delivery approach, which you can find at https://mobiusloop.com. Mobius has been developed by a community dedicated to harnessing the power of innovation and delivery excellence to more effectively achieve the outcomes that matter.
How to Use This Book
This book can be divided into three parts. The first part introduces the key dynamics that underlie the service delivery challenge. It sets the scene for how those of us in IT service delivery are constantly in danger of focusing far too much on removing delivery friction or reducing perceived delivery risk, often at the cost of maintaining situational awareness and ensuring teams have the ability to learn and improve.
Understanding these dynamics is important for any IT service delivery organization, and especially for those that wish to pursue the promise of DevOps. Overlooking them and missing their effects are what causes so many who pursue DevOps and Agile delivery approaches to fail to meet their promise from the start. This lack of awareness and appreciation of the way they can distort how we perceive the delivery ecosystem is also where many automation tooling and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) approaches so often fail.
The second part of the book dives into each of the key elements and the role they play in service delivery. It explores their importance, how they are so often misapplied, and the repercussions to service delivery and the team. I personally feel that this is the most important part of the book, and the one that is so often missing from most guides out there.
The third and last part of the book is a practical guide to help you improve your own service delivery effectiveness. It includes ways to determine the maturity of your team to ensure you have the key elements in place to deliver consistently and effectively. It also has a number of suggestions for how to organize and manage the flow of work, build and deploy instrumentation and automation solutions, and deal with governance associated with internal controls and those required to meet legal and regulatory requirements.
My Own Journey
This book draws from my own journey working in the trenches as an individual contributor and, later, a technical leader to build great IT services and improve the effectiveness of the teams delivering them. I know from firsthand experience that every ecosystem has different challenges, and what I have learned from my own missteps along the way has kept me level-headed and practical. More than anything, I want this book to be a useful addition to your bookshelf for a long time. This is why the focus of this book is to help you better understand your circumstances so that you and your organization can deliver more effectively, not to talk about some specific process or set of technology that will quickly be supplanted by the next big fad.
I have been blessed throughout my career to have met and worked alongside a number of people far smarter than I am who early on in my career exposed me to revolutionary concepts and ways of working. Some had worked alongside John Boyd’s “Fighter Mafia.” Others were Training Within Industry (TWI) veterans, or had to come up with ways to deliver highly reliable services long before the existence of concepts like cloud computing or continuous delivery. Only later did I realize that what I learned along the way is what has allowed me to quickly cut through delivery ecosystem noise to help teams overcome seemingly intractable problems. At times it has felt like a superpower, one that I hope I can share to help you reduce your own delivery pain and frustration to secure success.