How to improve your IT. Part 5 – Best practice IT Standards
IT Best Practices
Over the last 40 years, I have worked in many IT departments. One of the things I made a habit of looking for was what was contributing to great performance within each department. My investigations became a list of standards that I added to my IT Performance blueprint and which I called the Best practice IT Standards. These standards play a large part in delivering:
1. Outstanding business partnerships.
2. High-quality, cost-effective project delivery.
3. Technical excellence.
4. Better trained and fewer technical resources.
5. Consistent 99.9% systems availability.
6. Lower IT expenditure.
7. Longer IT memory.
8. Far fewer failures and need for rework.
9. Higher staff morale and job satisfaction levels.
IT Function matched with its Best practice IT Standard
Service Desk and ITSM
ITIL compliant Service Desk application and ITIL/ITSM Service Management framework.
Workload Management.
An end-to-end process comprised of Gating, Work Management, Work Classifications and Management Reporting.
Process and Intranet
All work is process-driven, with document management and templates managed in accordance with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM Level 2).
All process, how-to guidelines and other documentation sourced only from an Intranet. All documents are to be baselined with a single production version. The Intranet acts as the IT memory and single source of truth
Managed Services
Contract manager with a outsource diary, detailed knowledge of SLAs and contract schedules and weekly contract reviews.
Staff Training
Vendor product training.
Infrastructure.
Fleet upgrade strategy.
Capacity Management function for servers and network.
Desktop refresh strategy.
Standard Operating Environment (SOE).
DBMS management function.
Server performance management function.
Formal naming standards for servers and network hardware.
Applications Development.
Tailored SDLCs, Applications development suite, Documented legacy applications.
Documented methodologies, guidelines and policy on the use of scripts.
Projects.
End to end project management delivery process with supporting templates, guidelines and reporting documents.
Project Management Office.
Active PMO (as against passive), project management processes, templates and guidelines.
Quoting, Scoping, Estimating.
Services catalogue, standard quotation template.
Security.
Five levels of security management with penetration testing.
Change Control.
Change Advisory Board (CAB) with evidential submission criteria.
Disaster Recovery.
BCP, DRP. Testing, back-up site.
Architecture.
Application. - Applications guidelines and catalogue.
Technical. - Hardware, Server, Desktop and Systems software guidelines and catalogue.
Data. - Database Tables, Records, Fields, Naming definitions, guidelines and dictionary.
Diagrams.
WAN, LAN, Server, Architecture.
Technical Resource Management.
Minimise the number of technical resources, maximise the number of project resources.
Data Centre.
Asset protection, error-free batch processing, on-time online availability.
Tools and Utilities.
Vendor supported with OS, systems software and applications upgrade paths.
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