As operational failures occur in your system, you should learn from the mistake and identify the gap. Make sure those same events do not occur again, and you should have a solution ready in case a failure gets repeated. One way to improve is by running root cause analysis, also called RCA.

During RCA, you need to gather the team and ask five whys. With each why, you peel off one layer of the problem, and, after asking subsequent why, you get to the bottom of the issue. After identifying the actual cause, you can prepare a solution by removing or mitigating the resources and update the operational runbook with the ready-to-use solution.

As your workload evolves with time, you need to make sure the operation procedure gets updated accordingly. Make sure to validate and test all methods regularly, and that the team is familiar with the latest updates in order to execute them.