The Emergence of The Operational Management Reference Framework

What you have before you is the operational management reference framework developed over 30+ years of global IT operations experience, across 100+ clients.

This framework is the glue that brings everything together.

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When you embark on an IT operational analytics journey, it will be important for you to go beyond simple charts and tables. You will need to clearly explain how a business can achieve its goals and objectives,and overcome its challenges.

Understanding this framework and its role in helping the objectives, will allow you to do a more focused analysis and present findings, in a way that both a business audience, and a technical audience can act on.

If we take a look at the slide in a more detailed view, wecan begin to understand the importance of this framework. 

Let’s start from the top down.

Any issues an organization faces, such as customer satisfaction, service delivery, or contract alignment issues, to name a few, are typically impacted by weaknesses in the operational framework. 

Starting with the 15 core operational steady-state processes, we can see that they are: major incident management, problem management, availability management, service desk management, service and catalogue request management, Incident Management, and 9 other processes which we will review in detail further in the course.

These 15 processes are essential in bringing operational stability; however, they are not the only processes. 

Supporting these 15 core operational processes are an additional  23 processes that help to bring further stability and oversight of operational activities. These are your skills and training, quality management, knowledge management, staffing and resource management, and 11 other processes which we will review further in the course.

As we move further in the framework, wesee the next set is the first-line management systems. These management systems support the 37 operational processes we discussed above.

As you can imagine, people are needed to execute each of those processes. The question becomes how do you manage those people to ensure they are delivering on those processes? 

In the first line management system, we have seven core processes to ensure employees have what they need to succeed.Roles and responsibilities, processes and procedures, technology and tools,meetings, reporting and measurements, analytics and optimization, and continual service improvement. 

A first-line manager's job is to ensure all seven areas Of the first-line management system are covered when dealing with each employee.      

As we move further along in the framework, we see that Supporting the 7 first-line management systems and 38 operational management systems, are 20 Up line and governance systems. 

These up-line and governance systems aim to ensure that business objectives are being met. They include financial management, service level management, client relationship management, Business Controls management, cross-department management, vendor management, and 14 other processes which we will review further in the course.

As you will see from this framework, the 38 operational processes, the 7 first-line management processes, and the 20 upline and governance processes are all supported by 17 robust, employee engagement, enablement, and empowerment processes. Without having a connected workforce, it would be difficult to achieve the business objectives. These Employee processes are employee development, employee communications,employee/manager feedback programs, monthly accomplishments, and 13 other processes which we will review further in the course.     

This Framework is quite comprehensive, it will give you a view into seeing what is needed to set up a world-class operations team.