IT operations - Surprise or Cyclic?
We see that IT operations department has their employees on-call and sometimes they are called at odd-hours. Even in this day of technical experience and automations, we still find technical people requested to perform at odd-hours. Is there something wrong here?
Lets ask ourselves these:
a. Are there Key performance indicators in place?
b. How often is this hapenning and do we have a clear set of root cause analysis?
c. Are we leveraging a mix of tools and skills?
d. Is the morale affected?
e. Are the business process owners driving us out of balance?
I would come up with a 90 day plan, get the business process owner’s buy-in of new plan including setting KPI (including up-time, support turn-around time) and aligning remodelling portfolio management of projects, root-cause analysis, and leveraging tools and skills. Meet your team members, review goals and objectives with metrics for most areas and help them align with the above - demonstrate your leadership.
As your team members align themselves to your objectives, KPI and metrics you will start seeing what will work and what will not. You will definitely see some people leave but you will also see lots of improvements. Good luck!