Designing IT Teams for Delivery

Executive Summary

Split innovation and operations into individual teams with clearly defined KRA/KPI.

1. IT Operations Team

Service Desk – is the best-known function within the IT organization for most businesses. The service desk acts as a single point of contact between the business and the IT department where users can submit incident reports or requests for IT services.

Run Solutions – Running solutions is the main reason that IT operations exists. IT operators are responsible for performing data back-ups, restoring system after a service outage or update, configuring and tuning servers and other configuration items to optimize their performance and allocating IT resources where they are needed to promote effective service delivery.

Manage Infrastructure – Oversight of IT infrastructure is a key responsibility for IT operations managers. The IT infrastructure is comprised of computing and networking hardware, along with software applications that run on them. Infrastructure management includes oversight of hybrid cloud environments, applications deployed in the cloud, network security management, facilities management and hardware IT infrastructure components.

Manage Configurations – IT operations must document hardware configurations and solution dependencies, as well as implement new configurations to promote optimal performance of the IT infrastructure and services.

2. Systems Engineering Team

Evolve Infrastructure – IT operations play a dominant role in day-to-day maintenance, but IT operators can and must act as innovators who work to evolve the infrastructure in a way that meets the demands of the business. This includes activities such as identifying impacts of change, applying software patches and introducing new hardware and software applications to drive service performance.

Mitigate Disasters – IT operations teams are typically in charge of a business organization's disaster recovery plan. IT operations teams plan, simulate and practice disaster recovery situations to protect the business from experiencing significant downtime and lost revenue if an unexpected problem or disaster causes a major service outage.

Technical Management – provides high-level technical expertise that can be strategically applied to the design, management and support of IT infrastructure. An IT organization may assign a technical lead or technical analyst for each key technology area, whose purpose is to contribute technical knowledge to service life cycle decision-making.

Govern IT Operations – IT Operations monitors and measures the performance of the IT infrastructure, including the IT organization's security posture. It may also develop operational metrics to help evaluate the performance of key processes and services, manage software license compliance and conduct infrastructure audits to verify that security and performance targets are being met.

3. Software Engineering Team

Software Development – deals with the development of innovative applications and services primarily focused on improving the process and services of the business. Software development team possess specific programming knowledge that is required for designing, developing, controlling and monitoring applications at the level of code.

Application Management – deals with the technical aspect of managing applications that are necessary for supporting IT services within the organization. Application management teams play an important role in designing, testing, deploying, operating and optimizing applications.

Further Reading

• Team Topologies https://teamtopologies.com