Focus on Quality of Service
Delivering the right Quality of Service to our customers is vital. If the level of service is less than customers expect then we lose customers. If the level of service is too high, the value realised from each customer is less than the organisation expects.
In a Nutshell
The Quality of Service we can deliver to our customers is constrained by our product quality, our capacity to deliver service and our service capability. Product quality is influenced by Rate of Delivery and many other factors.
Product quality creates a link between Quality of Service and Rate of Delivery. Increasing Rate of Delivery may reduce product quality requiring more time and effort to be spent sustaining Quality of Service. This reallocation of effort will tend to suppress our Rate of Delivery. Unless we can increase the capability of our teams the Quality of Service and Rate of Delivery are both constrained.
We inspect the quality of service being provided to our customers. Quality of Service is compared with established targets and with emergent needs of our customers. These comparisons help us to understand how we need to adapt today, and how we will have to adapt in the future to meet emergent customer needs.
We use measures of Quality of Service to ensure our analysis is objective. We experiment to adapt our ways of working and other aspects of service delivery. Our objective is to better align the delivered Quality of Service with established customer targets.
Practices
Recover From Incidents
Blameless Post-Mortems are adopted as part Google’s Site Reliability Engineering framework. The concept has existed for sometime as part of traditional Service Operations. Its use within SRE shows its adoption in "DevOps” too. In this context, post-mortems are used to analyse the causes of operational failures and to decide how to improve the situation.
We work with our customers to identify the level of service they need in order to make continued use of our products and services. We identify the marginal level of service that will create the demand we are seeking. This level of service represents the lowest cost service option that will enable us to realise a viable number of customers and level of use.
Teams use service measures to understand whether the service they are providing to the customers meets the levels of service they have committed to. With sufficient history of data, we can begin to look at trends to see how quality of service is changing over time. The levels of service and trend information help the team to focus their attention on the improvements they need to make. We prioritise changes that will have the biggest impact on our Quality of Service.
