Book Review: The VisibleOps Handbook

The VisibleOps Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps

by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Publisher: Information Technology Process Institute
ISBN: 0975568612
Number of Pages: 100
Date Published: June 15, 2005


VisibleOps is one of my favorite computer geek books of all time.  This book is a no-nonsense, straight forward guide to running a highly successful IT department.  But, VisibleOps is not just some flavor of the week self-help management book.  The lessons and goals presented in VisibleOps are the culmination of years of observation and research by the authors, who happened to notice that successful organizations had IT departments that operated in very similar ways.  This book is a distillation of those observations into a methodology that is easy for anyone in IT to grok.  Loosely based on the ITIL framework, VisibleOps cuts straight to the chase with four basic steps. 
 
The Four Steps of Visbile Ops

Phase 1. Stabilize the PatientPhase 2. Catch & Release and Find Fragile ArtifactsPhase 3. Establish Repeatable Build LibraryPhase 4. Enable Continuous Improvement

Stabilize the Patient

In the first phase of VisibleOps, the goal is triage.  Can you reduce the number and impact of outages?  Some of the key ways to accomplish this goal is to implement and strengthen Change Management processes, only allow scheduled changes, and have a defined maintenance window.

Another huge benefit to the Change Management process that often gets overlooked is its ability to act as a communication tool and a way to publish a schedule of changes.  With these processes in place, you will have better visibility for outage responders:

1. What changed? 
2. How to back out that change

Fragile Artifacts

The second phase is all about using a risk based approach to identifying and cataloging critical systems.  Some of the key indicators include:

• Systems with the highest Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)
• Systems with low change success rates
• Systems with the highest downtime costs

But being able to understand and identify the cost of downtime requires understanding the business processes that each system supports.  That is why this phase is based on the Configuration Management process and includes implementing a Configuration Management Database (CMDB).  Once these processes are in place, you should see a reduction in variance, increased conformity in your systems, and it will be easier to detect anomalies within the environment.

Repeatable Build Library

In order to overcome the limitations imposed by the Fragile Artifacts, you must create a way to commoditize these systems.  Phase three is all about implementing proper Build and Release Management processes to further reduce variance and increase your understanding of what your systems are actually doing.  The thing that makes systems fragile in the first place is your lack of understanding about how that system operates.  

Once you are able to obtain that level of understanding, it is much easier to swap out interchangeable components than it is to ad-hoc a resolution out of random troubleshooting steps that you can't really explain WHY those steps "fixed" the issue.

Continuous Improvement

You would think that phase four would be self explanatory.  It is anything but that.  In terms of implementation, I have found that this can be the absolute most difficult because it requires a major shift in the culture of most organizations.  The VisibleOps Handbook provides some key indicators and metrics that can help track your progress on this journey.  It does not, however, provide much advice on how to steer your Titanic to avoid icebergs along the way.

Reflection

The thing I love the most about the Visible Ops approach to ITIL and managing IT in general, is how corporeal it is.  The word "visible" in the title obviously wasn't an accident; it is visible because the steps for implementation, the explanation of the methodology, really everything about it is so clearly evident that [almost] anybody should be able to thumb through this booklet and pick up some ideas that they can put to use right away and see results almost as fast.