High-Performance IT - Best Practice IT Standards

Where there are no standards there is only chaos.

High-Performance IT Health Checks proposes a set of Best Practice IT Standards for IT teams to follow. IT teams tend to use a variety of disjointed technical standards or none whatsoever. This situation leads to IT departments with:

1.     A complete lack of professional or industry standards.

2.     Multiple standards in use.

3.     An absence of good process.

4.     Multiple sources of technical truth.

5.     Scripts as a quick fix panacea.

6.     Production support band aide solutions.

7.     A high number of manual fix activities.

8.     A lack of automation.

9.     Poor systems implementations.

In some of the IT departments and teams that I managed, I noticed there were standards in use that produced significant benefits. These standards became the Best Practice IT Standards – use of these can be directly linked to:

1.     Cost savings.

2.     Better software implementations (Due to staff training being up to date.)

3.     Fewer service delivery failures and need for rework.

4.     IT intranet as a single source of truth.

5.     Automation of recurrent manual activities.

6.     Better hardware risk mitigation.

7.     Removal of redundant hardware, systems software, utilities, and tools.

8.     Higher-quality projects.

9.     Technical excellence.

10.   Consistent 99.9% systems availability.

11.   Higher staff morale and job satisfaction levels.

When the High-Performance IT process is rolled out, each IT team uses a Current/Target Position template to assess these two positions. The target position is based on the Best Practice IT Standards plus the teams’ own functional objectives.