About the three components necessary for successful IT operation

This brief post is an important addition to the series of articles titled 'How to Take Control of Your Network Infrastructure.' You can find all the articles in the series and links. here.

Why doesn't this work?

If you try to apply the described in this article processes and solutions in your company, you'll realize that it may not work for you.

For example, let's take the access provisioning process.
To 'launch' this process, you will need to do the following:

• arrange for all tickets to come to you through other technical departments
• ensure that these departments agree to document all requests passing through them
• require the leaders of non-technical departments to keep these access lists up to date

And how do you convince these people to perform this tedious, responsible, and largely non-core work? By the way, you are not their boss.

Arguments of feasibility and reason may not work because it might not seem reasonable to others. Obviously, it is usually not your responsibility to organize all this; it's enough to convince the management. But the thing is, if this is done against the will of the employees, it can lead to confrontation and political games, which will certainly hinder effective work.

It seems obvious to me that if you have a team of professionals, it is better to make decisions that involve collaboration together and find the best solutions together. However, something more should be present, not just good technical knowledge and understanding of what process is needed.

Everything that has been and will be described in the series of articles 'How to Take Control of Your Network Infrastructure' consists of proven processes and proven solutions. They work.

There can be various reasons why something is not applicable or does not work for you, such as a different structure of departments in the technical department or other network requirements. And of course, the solution should be discussed and adapted to your situation, but it is also very important what kind of relationships are cultivated in your company, what style of communication is set by the management, and what common processes exist.

Three components

This leads to nesting:

• You may have a strong team with technical expertise, but without well-defined and clear processes, you won't be able to effectively leverage that knowledge.
• You can have both a strong technical team and the knowledge and ability to create effective processes, but you won't be able to fully utilize them in this company if the appropriate relationships aren't in place.

In other words, we have a certain hierarchy of 'knowledge'. Let's conditionally name them.

• Technical knowledge.
• Processes
• Relationships

All three components are important, and many modern solutions (such as the DevOps approach) are based on the maturity of all three levels. Without this, it doesn't work.

Source: habr.com