It’s a familiar conundrum for anyone that is trying to achieve specific outcomes in complex organisations – it’s ridiculously easy for minor gaps between process handoffs to cause problems. Take cloud costs: they can be difficult to explain even when everyone has done what they were asked to do. Engineering provisioned the resource, the application team got it running, and Finance recorded the spend. Yet you’re still trying to establish who owns the thing and make sure it’s not wasting money by month 2, let alone in month 6 or 7!
Before organising another meeting about accountability, I’d want to check whether those teams ever agreed what they needed to pass to one another. It’s quite possible they’ve all completed their tasks while leaving a rather important bit of work somewhere in between.
For the delivery team, a resource that’s available and working may count as finished. The person allocating its cost, however, needs ownership information. Whoever forecasts consumption needs reliable usage data, while anyone considering optimisation needs enough context to avoid switching off something important.
Each has a reasonable understanding of what “done” should include. The trouble starts when they assume everyone else shares it.
That’s how a successful deployment can leave you, the person tasked with achieving a specific outcome, with a small detective assignment. Multiply that across an estate and you’ve created a thriving industry in chasing things, usually supported by a spreadsheet you didn’t want to create, and nobody particularly wants to maintain.
It’s also why here at ITAM Accelerate we’re interested in the connections between processes. Take tagging: an approved policy is a useful start, but its requirements need to reach provisioning, the resulting data needs checking, and somebody needs to act when it’s wrong. Without those connections, you can have a perfectly respectable policy and a beautifully provisioned resource but Finance still can’t allocate the costs.
The Cloud Lifecycle Management Process Kit brings together 26 processes, and our free Cloud Process Eco-System maps how they connect, including the triggers that move work between them. It gives you a way to follow those handovers and examine what should happen next.
Download the free Cloud Process Eco-System and have a look at the connections around a problem you recognise. You’ll want a decent-sized screen and possibly a cuppa. There’s a fair bit going on, but you don’t need to tackle the whole map in one sitting.
I’d suggest choosing one recurring headache and bringing together the people on either side of the handover. Ask the first team, “What tells you your work is finished?” Then ask the receiving team, “What do you need before you can start?”
The difference between their answers may explain quite a lot.
Perhaps one team considers a request complete when the resource is available, while the next assumes that means its ownership and cost information have already been verified. Nobody has deliberately dropped anything; they’ve been working from different assumptions about where their responsibilities begin and end.
Once that’s clear, you have something specific to improve. You can agree what information needs to accompany the resource, who checks it, and what happens if it’s missing. That’s a more useful starting point than asking everyone to “communicate better” and hoping for the best.
The Cloud Lifecycle Management Process Kit provides the process detail to help you work through those decisions. The ecosystem keeps the wider picture visible, so a change that helps one team also makes sense for the people receiving its work.
I wouldn’t begin by redesigning the entire estate. Start with the handover that keeps sending someone back to their inbox for another round of chasing.
Get the free ecosystem map here and take that problem to your next cloud management meeting. You may find your colleagues have been doing exactly what was expected of them. What needs attention is the work nobody realised was being skipped.
