Description

This curriculum spans the design, governance, and evolution of IT operations in complex organisations, comparable to a multi-phase internal capability program that integrates strategic planning, service lifecycle controls, incident resilience, and modernisation efforts across hybrid environments.

Module 1: Strategic Alignment of IT Operations with Business Objectives

Define service level agreements (SLAs) in collaboration with business units, balancing uptime requirements against operational cost constraints.
Map critical business processes to underlying IT services to prioritize incident response and capacity planning efforts.
Establish a formal change approval board (CAB) with representation from both IT and business stakeholders to govern high-impact changes.
Conduct quarterly service reviews to evaluate IT performance against business KPIs and adjust operational priorities accordingly.
Integrate IT operations roadmaps with enterprise financial planning cycles to align budget requests with strategic initiatives.
Implement traceability from IT investments to business outcomes using a balanced scorecard approach across financial, customer, internal process, and learning dimensions.

Module 2: Service Design and Lifecycle Management

Develop service design packages (SDPs) that include technical architecture, support models, and transition plans for new IT services.
Select between build, buy, or outsource options for service components based on total cost of ownership and internal capability gaps.
Define service retirement criteria and decommissioning procedures to manage technical debt and reduce operational overhead.
Standardize service templates for common offerings (e.g., virtual servers, databases) to accelerate provisioning and reduce configuration drift.
Conduct failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) during design to identify single points of failure and specify redundancy requirements.
Integrate security and compliance controls into service design to avoid retrofitting during deployment or audit cycles.

Module 3: Incident and Problem Management at Scale

Implement event correlation rules in monitoring tools to suppress noise and surface actionable alerts during major outages.
Define escalation paths and communication protocols for critical incidents involving executive stakeholders and external customers.
Classify incidents by impact and urgency to route to appropriate support tiers and allocate resources efficiently.
Conduct blameless postmortems with cross-functional teams to identify root causes and assign corrective actions with deadlines.
Balance automation of incident response with human oversight to prevent cascading failures from automated actions.
Maintain a known error database (KEDB) linked to the CMDB to accelerate diagnosis and resolution of recurring issues.

Module 4: Change and Configuration Management Governance

Classify changes into standard, normal, and emergency categories with differentiated approval workflows and risk assessments.
Enforce configuration item (CI) ownership and update responsibilities to maintain CMDB accuracy across hybrid environments.
Implement automated drift detection for critical systems and trigger reconciliation processes when deviations are identified.
Restrict privileged access to configuration management tools using role-based access control (RBAC) and just-in-time provisioning.
Conduct retrospective change success rate analysis to refine approval thresholds and reduce unnecessary governance overhead.
Integrate change management with deployment pipelines to ensure all production changes are tracked, even in CI/CD environments.

Module 5: Capacity and Performance Optimization

Forecast resource demand for critical applications using historical utilization trends and business growth projections.
Implement right-sizing policies for virtualized workloads based on actual performance data, avoiding over-provisioning.
Negotiate reserved instance commitments for cloud services after analyzing usage patterns over a 12-month period.
Conduct stress testing of key systems during maintenance windows to validate performance under peak load conditions.
Define performance baselines for databases and APIs to detect degradation before user impact occurs.
Balance cost and performance in storage tiering strategies by classifying data based on access frequency and retention requirements.

Module 6: Availability, Resilience, and Disaster Recovery

Design multi-region failover architectures for critical applications, accounting for data consistency and recovery time objectives (RTO).
Conduct unannounced disaster recovery drills to test failover procedures and identify gaps in documentation or tooling.
Implement automated health checks and DNS failover mechanisms for externally facing services with sub-minute detection.
Validate backup integrity through periodic restore tests and document recovery point objectives (RPO) for each data set.
Coordinate with legal and compliance teams to ensure DR site locations meet data sovereignty requirements.
Define minimum viable service sets to prioritize restoration efforts during extended outages with limited resources.

Module 7: Operational Reporting and Continuous Improvement

Select a core set of operational metrics (e.g., mean time to repair, change failure rate) to report monthly to IT leadership.
Implement automated data collection from monitoring, ticketing, and CMDB systems to reduce manual reporting effort.
Use control charts to distinguish between common cause and special cause variation in service performance data.
Conduct value stream mapping of incident resolution workflows to identify bottlenecks and rework loops.
Establish feedback loops from support teams to development and procurement functions to address recurring operational issues.
Align improvement initiatives with ITIL continual service improvement (CSI) model using gap analysis against maturity benchmarks.

Module 8: Integration of Modern Practices in Legacy Operations

Introduce infrastructure as code (IaC) in phases, starting with non-production environments and enforcing code review practices.
Adapt existing change management processes to accommodate automated deployments without compromising audit requirements.
Train legacy operations staff on observability tools (e.g., distributed tracing, log aggregation) to support microservices debugging.
Negotiate SLAs for containerized workloads considering orchestration platform reliability and node failure rates.
Bridge monitoring gaps between traditional agents and cloud-native telemetry sources using unified observability platforms.
Define operational handover criteria from project to operations teams, including documentation, support readiness, and runbook completion.