The Operations Manager

So what else does Operations do? Well, there is a whole organisation run by the UK govermnent to help answer that question! ITIL , or the IT Infrastructure Library, is a library of best practice information that basically tells you everything you need to do to run an IT department. Similarly developers have development methodologies such as RAD, JAD, Agile/XP, and Project Managers have PM methodologies such as Prince 2, PMBok etc to cover off their areas in more specific detail. ITIL breaks it down into 7 key areas: Service Support - deals with the actual provision of IT services such as the service (help) desk, incident management, problem management, release management etc Service Delivery - deals with ensuring that you can continue to DELIVER the service support functions with things like contigency planning, capacity management, service levels etc The Business Perspective - helps to ensure that the IT function is aligned with the organisation's business strategy and that how to

Since the title of my blog is "TheOpsMgr" I thought I should at least define what an "Ops Mgr" (Operations Manager) actually IS (or at least in terms of my current job). Because I work for a small-ish online publishing company (about 200 people, with about 35 people in the Technology team) the Operations role is best defined as by a negative - "Operations is everything the Developers and the Project Managers DON'T do...". Most people have a fairly instinctive grasp of what Developers and Project Managers do - developers "develop stuff" (that becomes the new websites in our case) and PM's "manage stuff" (the projects that the developers work on). But what about the rest of the job of managing the day to day operations of the websites (or any other IT system)? The Operations function that most users would be familiar with is the "help desk" (or service desk as it tends to be called these days) but this is only the visibl