Guides
Practical, honest writing on consolidating your stack, running client work end-to-end, and getting more done with fewer tools. New pieces land here and in the RSS feed.
A major incident is one whose impact is large enough that the normal process cannot handle it. It calls for a different level of organisation, set up before it is needed.
Every method for finding causes has a failure mode of its own. Know what each is good for, use more than one, and be wary of any that offers a single tidy answer.
Treating every ticket the same way sends outages to the back of a queue and sends routine requests to the on-call phone. Four labels prevent both.
A team of five has the same kinds of work as a team of five hundred: requests, outages, problems and changes. It needs the habits, not the apparatus.
The DORA measures describe the speed and stability of software delivery. They are useful when they are defined carefully and harmful when they become individual targets.
An indicator measures how the service behaves, an objective says how good it should be, and an agreement says what you promise. Keeping them apart makes reliability a decision rather than a feeling.
An intake form is the front door of a team. A good one gathers exactly what the team needs to act and sends the request to the right person without a conversation.
A no-show costs the time of the person who waited and the slot nobody else could take. Most no-shows are preventable with a few small design choices.
A booking page is a set of rules about when you are available. Each rule removes slots from view, so a guest never sees a time they cannot have.
Round-robin scheduling spreads incoming bookings across a team so that nobody is overloaded and the guest gets the first available person. The rules behind it decide whether it feels fair.
Triage turns a pile of requests into an ordered queue with owners. It is quick when the rules are written down and slow when every request is a negotiation.
A service level agreement is a promise. Make it one you can keep, measure it honestly, and report misses without defensiveness.
A service desk is the single point of contact between the people who provide a service and the people who use it. Good ones make requests easy, answers fast and patterns visible.
Most ITSM purchases go wrong by starting from a feature matrix. Start from the practices you will run, then check which requirements they impose.
IT service management is how an organisation designs, delivers and improves the IT services that other people rely on. It is a set of habits before it is a tool.
A change request should be short enough to complete and complete enough to approve. These are the fields that earn their place.
An emergency change is a change that cannot wait for the normal route. It needs a faster path, but not an absent one. The safeguards you keep are the ones that are cheap and effective.
A change advisory board reviews changes that carry real risk. Run well, it is short and useful. Run badly, it is the reason people ship around the process.
Change management controls how modifications reach live systems, so that the benefit of a change is not outweighed by the incident it causes. This guide covers the types, the approvals and the record.
A known error database holds the failures you already understand and how to get around them. Its value is measured at three in the morning, by whoever is on call.
Incident management restores service. Problem management removes the reasons the incidents keep coming. Without it, a team can respond brilliantly and still be woken by the same failure every month.
When most pages need no action, people learn to ignore pages, including the one that matters. Alert fatigue is a reliability risk and a retention risk at once.
Schedules assume that everyone is available. They are not. A clear, simple swap policy keeps the pager covered without leaving the schedule disagreeing with reality.
Most on-call surprises are handover failures: something the last person knew and the next person did not. A short written handover removes most of them.
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