Principles - ITIL Tutorial

- [Instructor] The three fundamental devops principles respected by many devops practitioners are called the three ways. This model was developed by Gene Kim, author of Visible Ops and The Phoenix Project, and Mike Orzen, author of Lean IT. The three ways are systems thinking, amplifying feedback loops, and a culture of continuous experimentation and learning. Let's have a look at how these fit within ITIL-driven shops. The first way is systems thinking which is valuing the performance of an entire system over the performance of a specific silo of work or department. The idea is to get us to focus on the overall outcome of the entire pipeline in our value chain rather than making the mistake of optimizing a part of the chain at the expense of overall results. In devops, we use systems thinking as guidance when defining success metrics in evaluating the outcomes of changes. One thing you can do here is apply system thinking to the service lifecycle, from strategy, design, transition, operations, to continual improvement. To do so, you must work to make the following habits part of how we do things around here. Never pass the unknown defect to downstream work centers or allowing local optimizations create global degredation, and always seeking to increase flow, and always seeking to achieve a profound understanding of the overall system. The second way is amplifying feedback loops where feedback loops are where the output is looped back into the input and has an influence on what to do next. Between the parts of the organization that are in the flow of the value chain, that is creating, shortening, and amplifying right-to-left feedback loops so necessary corrections can be continually made. Because feedback loops enable corrections to be made, feedback loops are huge in devops. The key thing to note here is that you shouldn't just restrict their use to agile software development. Feedback loops are applicable everywhere. So as with the first way, let's apply the second way, amplify feedback loops, to the entire service lifecycle, both within and between phases. To do this, you must work to make the following habits part of how we do things around here at your organization. Understanding and responding to all customers, internal and external. Shortening and amplifying all feedback loops, and embedding knowledge where it's needed. The third way, engendering a culture of continual experimentation and learning fosters two things. First, continual experimentation, taking risks, and learning from failure, and understanding that repetition in practice is required for mastery. Experimentation and risk taking are what ensures that we keep pushing to improve and mastery of the skills, not just intellectual understanding of them. A good way to apply the third way is to the roles set out in ITIL, process and service owners, and process managers. To do so, allocate time in roles for the improvement of daily work, create rituals that reward the team for taking risks, and introduce faults into the system to increase resilience. Lastly, apply the third way when creating team processes and standards and in your leadership style.