Good reference book for IT Leaders and Executives

books:


	• The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps Kevin Behr; Gene Kim; George Spafford Information Technology Process Institute, 2005 - 112 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good reference book for IT Leaders and Executives

I bought this book to help me implement process improvement practices, specifically around IT Change & Release Management at my company. Implementing a process requires not only the definition of the process but efficient management of that process. For the most part, this book provides practical ideas and good descriptive examples of real world situations.

This is also a great book for anyone studying for the ITIL Certification Exam. It is even better for someone that is trying to implement some of the ITIL best practices into their organization. I would recommend it as a reference for Senior Management and other IT leaders in IT operations.

It was quite interesting to learn about the author's concept of DSL (Definitive Software Library). Some of the ideas presented in this book can be viewed as radical & extreme. For example it indicates that if a team member makes a unauthorized change to the system without getting approval first, he should be demoted to a position on the team where he can no longer make any changes. Depending on the impact of the change, this might be warranted but doing so, just to "reinforce the process" seems too excessive.

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Good Insights, Poor Delivery

This book was chock full of practical information and profound insights. It is obvious to me that the author team have a depth of knowledge and practical experience and the way in which they have framed the information is done so in a really useful way. With all the intelligence and experience bound up in this book, I am perplexed as to how they were convinced that the actual design of their product was somehow beneficial. I "get" that they wanted to make it a pocket reference and present it as a handy guide, but c'mon--has someone heard of Section 508 compliance [for those of us w/ visual and other sort of accessory impairments]? The material is almost inaccessible as the book is published in what appears to be 8pt. font. I started reading the book several times and had to put it down until I finally broke through the barrier of having got thru enough of the book to realize that the content actually made the migraine inducing fine print worthwhile. I think they've out-"cuted" themselves and yet I find myself endorsing the material as useful to pros interested in this field.

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Great place to start

'The Visible Ops Handbook' is a great resource that highlights why you may want to reorganize your IT operations. The book then provides some excellent ideas on how to get started. It is also a good source of details you can use to convince others that aligning your IT operations with a best practice solution is worth doing.

Excellent whitepaper, weak book

Visible Ops contains some good - though oft repeated - insight and information regarding ITIL and infrastructure support by consultants who have obviously spent some time in the trenches. Its premise is based on Gartner research stating that 80% of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues and 80% of the time spent in resolving downtime is unproductive and there are systems administration principles and activities that can mitigate. The problem with Visible Ops is that the volume of content warrants a whitepaper, yet the authors seemingly add filler to justify the $22 sales price.

The authors are one of the first to offer in print some solutions for infrastructure support that validate what IT infrastructure managers have been doing for years. The ideas of rebuild v. repair, "source control" of infrastructure builds, repeatable infrastructure build processes are right on. Yet instead of case studies and further exploration, we get multiple pages of testimonials, a forward, an introduction, a multiple-page TOC, a mere 40 pages of content which include repetition, constant summarization, and more testimonials, and 30 pages of appendices of largely copyrighted and incomplete material. As a final insult, there are ads on the front and back covers. At least one of the authors sells tools to remedy some of the problems mentioned in "Visible Ops" and it seems he is hedging his bets by charging for materials that should be marketing and product literature.

Why not give more detailed examples and case studies, expound on the CMDB, give some ideas on organizing builds or address other ITIL areas? This is *great* stuff here, but I feel like it has been cheapened. Regardless, I recommend "Visible Ops" because it addresses common and significant problems and solutions that are rarely addressed elsewhere.

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Well worth considering

I have long been a believer that books are to be shared. I spent a lot on this book with a weird format and less than 100 pages, and since I have done that, I have struggled to keep my hands on it.

In an organisation that is trying had to follow the ITIL framework, most of my colleagues are familiar with the principles, and applying them in practice. This book presents a simple way for those people to see real results quickly, and clarified things in a simple way for non ITIL trained people.

It's expensive, and the paper back was really bad quality, but I would still recommend the book (and yes, I have bought a couple of new versions for the library).

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

The Core of Visible Ops Visible Ops is a methodology designed to jumpstart implementation of controls and process improvement in IT organizations needing to increase service levels, security, and auditability while managing costs. Visible Ops is comprised of four prescriptive and self-fueling steps that take an organization from any starting point to a continually improving process. Making ITIL Actionable Although the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a wealth of best practices, it lacks prescriptive guidance: What do you implement first, and how do you do it? Moreover, the ITIL books remain relatively expensive to distribute. Other information, publicly available from a variety of sources, is too general and vague to effectively aid organizations that need to start or enhance process improvement efforts. The Visible Ops booklet provides a prescriptive roadmap for organizations beginning or continuing their IT process improvement journey. Why Do You Need Visible Ops? The Visible Ops methodology was developed because there was not a satisfactory answer to the question: ?I believe in the need for IT process improvement, but where do I start?? Since 2000, Gene Kim and Kevin Behr have met with hundreds of IT organizations and identified eight high-performing IT organizations with the highest service levels, best security, and best efficiencies. For years, they studied these high-performing organizations to figure out the secrets to their success. Visible Ops codifies how these organizations achieved their transformation from good to great, showing how interested organizations can replicate the key processes of these high-performing organizations in just four steps: 1. Stabilize Patient, Modify First Response ? Almost 80% of outages are self-inflicted. The first step is to control risky changes and reduce MTTR by addressing how changes are managed and how problems are resolved. 2. Catch and Release, Find Fragile Artifacts ? Often, infrastructure exists that cannot be repeatedly replicated. In this step, we inventory assets, configurations and services, to identify those with the lowest change success rates, highest MTTR and highest business downtime costs. 3. Establish Repeatable Build Library ? The highest return on investment is implementing effective release management processes. This step creates repeatable builds for the most critical assets and services, to make it ?cheaper to rebuild than to repair.? 4. Enable Continuous Improvement ? The previous steps have progressively built a closed-loop between the Release, Control and Resolution processes. This step implements metrics to allow continuous improvement of all of these process areas, to best ensure that business objectives are met.

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