Introduction
At Equal Experts, we help organisations to achieve sustainable innovation. If your organisation has a similar ambition, you'll likely need improvements in:
- Deployment throughput. Digital services need to constantly evolve, to meet your changing customer needs in a competitive landscape. Accelerate by Dr. Nicole Forsgren et al found organisations with a high deployment throughput were twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity expectations.
- Service reliability. Digital services need to be consistently reliable, to protect your revenue, costs, and brand reputation. A Fortune 1000 survey by IDC found the average cost of a critical failure was between $0.5M and $1M per hour.
- Learning culture. To foster high-performing teams, a culture of continuously creating insights and implementing improvements is required. A typology of organisational cultures by Ron Westrum demonstrates that a stronger culture results in higher levels of trust, collaboration, and higher quality decision-making.
These improvements are essential if you want to optimise your customer experience, achieve delivery excellence, and minimise your operational costs. Robert Charette estimated in Inside the hidden world of legacy IT systems that 75%, or $26.25 trillion of worldwide IT spending 2010-2020 was on operational expenditure.
Many of our customers use the traditional operating model, of one or more operations teams doing deployments and providing production support. We call this Ops Run It. We believe Ops Run It can't achieve the standards of deployment throughput, service reliability, and learning culture required for digital service management. This has been validated by Charles Betz of Forrester Research, who warns in The Future of Technology Operations that "the old guard operating practices of ITIL, COBIT, PMBoK, and CMMI are rapidly losing relevance", and "a plan/build/run lifecycle is no longer suitable".
You Build It You Run It is a modern operating model. It's the de facto name for on-call product teams owning all aspects of their custom digital services, from inception to decommission. They launch to live traffic, monitor customer behaviours, and respond to production incidents themselves. You Build It You Run It transforms technology operations from reactive ticket management to proactive continuous improvement.
We recommend You Build It You Run It for higher demand digital services. Adopting You Build It You Run It means comprehensive changes for people, processes, and technology. It requires the creation of cross-functional teams who are responsible for development, testing, and production support of digital services. It means redefining roles, streamlining service management processes, and building a fully automated toolchain from deployment pipeline to incident management.
We still advise using Ops Run It for lower demand foundational systems, including self-hosted COTS applications and custom integrations. A central operations team remains a cost-effective option where demand for product features is low.
This means that modern technology operations equates to a hybrid operating model - You Build It You Run It for digital services, and Ops Run It for foundational systems.
What is in this playbook
This playbook compares You Build It You Run It to Ops Run It. The comparison is in terms of deployment throughput, service reliability, and learning culture.
Deployment throughput is the production output for a service. It is expressed in terms of deployment frequency and deployment lead time. Creating a fully automated deployment pipeline and modernising ways of working accelerates the rate of production deployments. See Measuring Continuous Delivery by Steve Smith.
Service reliability is the ability of a service to function without failure. This is a narrow definition that omits functional correctness and customer experience. Service reliability can be expressed as an availability level, and time to restore availability. Improving the operability of a service increases its availability, by creating sources of adaptive capacity. See On adaptive capacity in incident response by John Allspaw et al.
A learning culture is how people acquire new knowledge and skills, within the shared, implicit assumptions underpinning their social behaviours. It's a cycle of never-ending improvement, based on generating insights and implementing improvements from deployment and availability problems. A strong learning culture empowers people to experiment, make more informed decisions, and collaborate on shared organisational goals. See Continuous learning as a tool for adaptation by Nora Jones.
Table 1 summarises the characteristics of You Build It You Run It and Ops Run It.
Text
You Build It You Run It
Ops Run It
Deployment throughput
Deployment frequency
Daily+ to weekly
Fortnightly to monthly
Deployment lead time
Minutes to days
Days to months
Total cost of ownership %
Low to medium
Medium to high
Service reliability
Developer operability incentives
Strong
Weak
Availability level
95.0% to 99.99%
95.0% to 99.99%
Time to restore availability
Minutes to hours
Hours to days
Total cost of ownership %
Low to medium
Medium to high
Learning culture
Learning predisposition
Act on insights
Rush to fix
Time to generate insights
Hours to days
Hours to days
Time to implement actions
Hours to days
Weeks to months
Total cost of ownership %
Low to medium
Medium to high
Standards
Supported standards
ITIL v3
ITIL v4
PCI-DSS
SOX
COBIT
ITIL v3
ITIL v4
PCI-DSS
SOX
Table 1- Operating model comparison table
We've established relative cost estimates for deployment throughput, service reliability, and learning culture in Ops Run It and You Build It You Run It. These estimates are based on our shared experiences of working with on-call product teams and central operations teams, in many different organisations. Detailed analyses are available in What is Ops Run It and What is You Build It You Run It. We believe Ops Run It has much higher opportunity costs, whereas You Build It You Run It has higher setup costs, and the run costs are similar.
Who is this playbook for
We've written this playbook for CxOs, product managers, delivery managers, and operations managers. We're looking to help people answer questions such as:
- Why is it so difficult to accomplish weekly deployments and/or 99.9% availability with a central operations team?
- What are the key characteristics of on-call product teams, in terms of deployment workflow, availability restoration, and learning from failures?
- How can the cost effectiveness of on-call product teams be measured, and compared with a central operations team?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of on-call product teams, compared to a central operations team?
- What mistakes can be made when starting out with on-call product teams, and how can we avoid them?
- We've answered these questions in a way that will benefit a majority of readers, while recognising that context always matters.
Readers will notice us favouring Continuous Delivery and Operability over DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). See The value of operability by Dan Mitchell, and What you should (and probably shouldn't) try from SRE by Steve Smith and Ali Lotia.
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