Availability and Capacity Management in the Cloud

An ITSM Narrative Account

Daniel McLean

• Publisher: ITGP
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781849285506
• eBook ISBN: 9781849285520
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

The truth about integrating Cloud services and ITSM
Cloud functionality increases flexibility and capacity in IT systems, but it also adds complexity and requires a combination of business, financial and technical expertise to make it work effectively. Moreover, organizations often confuse availability with capacity, and assume incorrectly that using cloud services reduces the need to manage these factors.

Lessons from real projects in a narrative format
In Availability and Capacity Management in the Cloud: An ITSM narrative, Daniel McLean's fictional IT service management practitioner, Chris, faces the challenge of integrating cloud services into an ITSM structure. Based on the real-life experience of the author and other ITSM practitioners, this book tells the story of a cloud services implementation, exposing potential pitfalls and exploring how to handle issues that come with such projects.

Tips to help you through your own project
The end-of-chapter pointers give useful advice on dealing with the challenges organizations face when considering cloud services. Read this book and see how Chris meets the challenge of integrating cloud services with ITSM, and how you can do the same. Learn from the successes. Avoid the mistakes

CHAPTER 1: ALL TOGETHER NOW

We arrived at the facility on yellow school buses, each of which was segregated by function. Short of a skeleton crew to cover any emergencies, all of IT was here, even the sleepy-eyed third shifters. To the casual observer we must have seemed more like a plague of locusts than a gathering of professionals. Everything had been tightly scripted and scheduled; from fluorescent-vested coordinators with clipboards, to pre-assigned boarding order and seating. Even a military invasion must have involved less planning and management than this soiree.

The trip had been almost silent but it had been clear by the glow of tablets and phones, and the tip-tap of fingers on screens, that the conversation was raucous. The facility had a huge auditorium and was used for all types of civic, cultural and business events. I’d been here before, but never for business reasons. What ticked me off was that this meeting was being held immediately after the close of the business day – on our time, not the company’s. If it was so important to the company, why didn’t they have the meeting on their time, in the middle of the day?

The sales teams burst off their buses before their buses were even lined up at the entrance to the auditorium. Their teams tried to jostle through the doors, competing to see who would be first into the corporate kick-off of the new sales program … the one that was going to save what was being rumored as a truly terrible year.

The sales teams clustered in front of the locked lobby doors that led to the auditorium itself, ensuring that when access was finally granted that they would be the first. The other groups – marketing, finance, IT, support, and others, milled about in the lobby but not mixing with each other, much like herds of wild animals wandering across the veldt separately but sharing a common waterhole. No one had planned it that way; it just seemed to be the natural inclination of everyone there.

While some of the groups talked and the service desk members even raised some noise, I was not surprised that the IT teams fell into the stereotype they had shown on the bus and stood silently, messaging each other electronically. It always felt somewhat creepy to be standing amongst a group of people who were interacting at a ferocious pace but the only sound was the tapping of fingers against screens, framed by an occasional giggle.

Food had been placed on tables scattered through the lobby. Probably an attempt by leadership to make sure there wasn’t a riot. Putting food in front of a group of IT people was like offering food to a swarm of locusts. Drop it off and get away quickly, before you lose any fingers. By the time I fought my way to the table, there wasn’t much beyond packets of condiments and a few napkins scattered around. Talking to others, I discovered our leadership had provided us with steamed hot dogs, chips, brownies and chocolate chip cookies, all washed down with sugary soft drinks. Knowing that, I felt better I’d missed the food.

Finally, the coordinators in orange security vests, with their clipboards at the ready, herded us into the auditorium, one functional group at a time. It seemed attendance was being taken. I looked closely at the burly monitor checking our team off on his list. I’d never seem him before and he was not someone you would easily forget. He wasn’t wearing a company badge and wouldn’t have looked out of place as a bouncer at a biker’s bar on dollar beer night.

I stifled a laugh when Mukasa, one of the application developers walking behind me, broke the electronic curtain of silence and actually spoke. With a pronounced Midlands-inflected accent, he said, “You’d think they were worried the IT folks were going to riot and they needed to bring in the SWAT team just in case we unleashed some rogue software loose on them.”

Finally, we made it into the main auditorium. More orange-vested coordinators directed us to our section. We were grouped by function, with small spaces left between each group, lending credence to Mukasa’s idea that the coordinators were more accustomed to handling drunks ready to fight, than teams of professionals here for a leadership command performance.

The lights in the seating area were off, but the reflections from the spotlights and lasers swirling on the stage cast a glow bright enough for me to follow the person in front of me to my seat. The experience was overwhelming. The stage had a curtained backdrop that twinkled under the dance of lights and theatre smoke rising from the stage. Hanging in front of the curtain were six enormous monitors, each playing video pictures of the company, cross-cut with vignettes of the executives and their families. There was no sound from the individual screens. Instead, there was the gut-shaking thump of a beat-heavy trance club mix swirling around the room.

The IT people sat silently in the glow of their electronic devices, while the marketing teams were gyrating to the music. Someone in the support group had acquired a large plastic ball they were bouncing overhead, being ever so careful not to let it stray into the airspace of another group.

While most of the people were occupied in their own version of killing time, senior managers were standing at their seats, oblivious to the environment around them. Some were gesturing with their fingers and others taking notes. As near as I could see, they were counting heads for their teams. An open hand slapped lightly against my back. I turned as Sean gestured toward the counters and said, “Good thing you made it. Would hate to see you removed from the company for a dumb mistake. Make sure you are seen by your manager, so your attendance is duly noted.”

“It’s voluntary, last I checked.”

Sean laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t notice your yellow pigtails, perky smile and your cute little dog.” He whistled loudly, then shouted out his manager’s name. When his manager turned to look, Sean waved and yelled, “Please mark me present, sir.” His manager grimaced and nodded back at Sean, then continued his counting.

Sean had been with the company for a long time. When he’d started, it was a young company with a small cluster of people in IT. He knew all of the original executives personally, because he’d worked with them. He’d seen a lot of people come and go. He’d been here so long, I was half convinced that he’d been born in a conference room. His fingerprints were all over almost every system and tool IT had ever built or installed. I’d met him the first week I came onboard, and he always seemed to know the answer to any question I could ask. More importantly, he always took the time to answer any question I put to him.

I liked working with Sean because he knew so much about the way this organization operated, and about all those things people never write down. You just had to wade through his sarcastic manner of dealing with people and the frustrating realization that, because of his longevity and personal relationships with senior leaders, he could get away with behaviors that would have anyone else fired in a heartbeat.

Laughing, Sean threw himself down into the seat beside me. “Since when has anything you’ve ever been asked to do here been anything but a command performance”?

In the nine months I’d been here, I’d learned that Sean was generally correct when it came to matters about the company. He was right about this event.

This was a command performance to launch a new application called CET, the Customer Engagement Tool; an application to support a major improvement of the company’s customer relationship management capabilities.

Leadership was promising CET was the savior of what, up until now, had been eight months of dismal sales results. The implicit message to IT was that if this new tool didn’t fix that revenue problem, there would be less money and fewer people in IT next year.

I’d seen this approach used at quite a few companies to motivate the sales teams. It was the kind of thing that energized people with their mindset.

It was the equivalent of one size fits all. What had never made sense to me was how leadership always seemed to think things which motivated sales teams would also motivate IT people, such as developers – creators who had a reputation for being arrogant, moody and disagreeable, with a fondness for shooting down ideas and endlessly debating pedantic details. These were often people who last saw sunlight three months ago and subsisted on a diet of coffee, Chinese food, and anything that you could put hot sauce on. The message might be transferable, but it always seemed to me that the form of the message should have been tuned to the intended audience.

However, someone in senior leadership had decided it was better to use an afternoon of our personal time and the company’s money, rather than promoting products, or buying new tools, or hiring needed employees. So I trusted they knew what was best, and in this case, it was to spend all of these resources on a circus.

The room darkened, and people quickly took their seats. Conversation dropped to a minimum. Just before it went completely dark, the entire room exploded in sight and sound. Strobing laser lights danced out from the stage and across the attendees … jerking in time to pounding house music, loud enough to make the floor rumble like there was an earthquake. The monitors on stage flashed to white-out, then faded to a rapid-fire mélange of company buildings, people, and products. Each screen showed a different set of pictures. Slowly, the screen images synchronized on an image of Jonah, our CEO, grinning at the audience from each screen. As he opened his mouth, all of the music stopped and the room was strangely quiet. You could almost hear people breathing.

“Welcome to our kick-off of CET,” bellowed his image. On the screen, graphics of charts and graphs appeared behind him, all showing inexorable growth from the rollout of CET. “Our kick-off unites us company-wide. From those here in the building, to those around the world viewing us live, we are all one team; one team focused on a single goal … one team exploding into new heights of sales and profits … one team setting new records again this year – but only if you want it hard enough. Do you want it? Let me hear you. Do you want it”?

The audience erupted into screams and cheers. People jumped to their feet and began clapping … chanting Jonah’s name.

With an explosive rumble, each image of Jonah turned and gestured, as if pointing to the rear of the stage. Out from behind the curtain ran Jonah, dressed just as he was in the video. The monitors instantly switched from recorded to live feed. Visible on all monitors simultaneously, Jonah ran back and forth across the edge of the stage. Wireless mini-mike on the side of his head, he pointed at the cheering crowd, calling out people’s names and teams.

“Are you ready for success”? he yelled, never slowing for a moment. “Are we the best? Are we the winners? Are we the ones our customer’s need”?

People screamed with each question, and that only seemed to pump him up even more.

“Then let’s meet the rest of our leadership team. The people who will guide us all into the future.”

From alternating sides of the stage, the senior leadership team ran onto the stage, one at a time, as Jonah called their names, while a video montage of them around the company played on each of the monitors. One by one they gathered behind him, slapping backs and shaking hands, as strobes pulsed and music boomed. As the last ran onto the stage and joined the others, the music reached its peak, the monitors went pure white, and the room lit up completely bright with every light on full. The lights blinked like a giant flashbulb and settled back to normal, with the entire senior leadership team sitting in chairs arranged in a semi-circle, with Jonah standing in the center at the edge of the stage.

The people in the auditorium jumped to their feet and erupted into applause. Jonah waved everyone to be quiet and sit down. After a few moments, the room settled into silence.

“Thank you … thank you all for taking the time out of your valuable day to be here,” said Jonah. “But we are not alone. We are united around the globe. Through the expertise of our world-class IT team, every member of our organization is now part of this meeting … united as one … unified in our drive to make CET a success.”

Jonah spun and pointed at the monitor over his left shoulder and shouted, “Give me Helsinki.” The picture shifted to an auditorium, not unlike this one, filled with wildly cheering people. Jonah spun around and pointed to the screen over his right shoulder and yelled, “Give me Mumbai,” and it filled with yelling people. Jonah pointed to a third monitor and shouted, “Give me Tokyo.” Another screen full of screaming people appeared.

Jonah ran to the edge of the stage and yelled, “Now for the star of this show … CET.”

The screens switched instantly to the familiar opening interface of CET. Attendants ran out from the wings and passed out tablets and laptops to the leadership sitting on stage.

Jonah pointed to the monitors where each senior leader could be seen logging into CET. “This is to show that your leadership team has no problem getting its hands dirty.”

Laughter rang through the auditorium.

At each site, other leaders began logging into CET. The screens filled with data and the various inputs of CET. It was an amazing piece of design and coding, and it looked beautiful.

But only for an instant.

Without warning, the picture on one of the on-stage monitors lost sync, turned to static, popped off and the screen faded to black. An instant later, two other screens went dark … followed one at a time by every other monitor on stage. Although we couldn’t see their screens, it was immediately apparent that the leaders were having the same response on their machines. Attendants ran out from the wings of the stage and worked feverishly trying to get them working, but with no success.

The room went silent for a moment before IT phones started lighting up. Network managers and engineers ran from their seats towards the lobby, while others started working their tablets with great purpose.

Jonah stood near the edge of the stage. With a forced smile, he said, “This goes to show you that no plan … however great, ever survives contact with reality … regardless of how world-class your IT department may be. Stuff happens, and we must be prepared to …”

With a loud pop, all of the wireless microphones went dead. Whilst we could see Jonah’s lips moving, no one could hear a thing.

Sean leaned over and whispered, “Rule number one of corporate survival. Never, ever, embarrass the CEO and the rest of the executive leadership team in public. I smell some firings in IT coming, just as a warning not to let this happen again. If I were you, I’d keep my head down.”

Fortunately, the monitors flickered back to life after a few minutes and sound returned to the microphones shortly thereafter. The leadership team resumed where they had left off; showing us how CET was better than anything the competition had, and was a response to many customer complaints and suggestions.

Jonah and the leadership team did their best to whip the audience excitement back up, but the moment seemed to have been lost. They covered everything they’d set out to share, but while the content was there, the emotion had been drained from the room. You want your new world-beating service to be invulnerable, the juggernaut we needed to succeed. CET had shown us it was vulnerable before it was even fully launched. The worst part was we didn’t know what it was vulnerable to. All I knew, and all everyone there knew, was that it could fail without a lot of effort.

It was a solemn group that filed out of the auditorium and onto the buses. It was the antithesis of the group that had gone in. Rather than surging out ready to take on the world, we looked like a long line of prisoners … beaten down people with no hope, who were just mindlessly going through the motions. If the purpose of the meeting had been to whip up our fervor, the meeting had been a failure. In fact, it had left us worse off than when we started.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: All Together Now
• Chapter 2: One Big, Happy Family
• Chapter 3: Who Wants to Support this Service?
• Chapter 4: The Abandoned Service
• Chapter 5: Don’t Confuse me with the Details
• Chapter 6: Voices in the Night
• Chapter 7: When Capacity isn’t Enough
• Chapter 8: Coffee Talk
• Chapter 9: Just Sit There and Take It
• Chapter 10: Once More Unto the Breach, My Friend?
• Chapter 11: Reprimand by Remote Control
• Chapter 12: Success Feels Good
• Chapter 13: No Plan Survives Contact with Reality
• Chapter 14: Things are Rarely what they Seem
• ITG Resources