6.4Operations design and cost, staffing, and budget management

Operations is an activity that "creates value only by being kept running," and what governs its quality and sustainability is structure design and the control of cost, staffing, and budget. A service manager must meet the level promised in the SLA with staffing and shifts that are neither excessive nor deficient, optimize running cost (the trade-off between safety and savings), measure operational quality with KPIs and improve, and control outsourcing, resources, and budget in a planned way. Adding people makes the SLA easier to meet but swells cost—designing this balance point is the practice.

6.4.1Operations design and shifts/staffing

• Operations design is the activity of designing—before service starts—the structure, procedures, role division, escalation paths, and monitoring/automation policy for running the service stably. If operations design is weak, it is undecided who judges what during a failure and the initial response lags. Working backward from the SLA's required levels (availability, response time, coverage hours), you prepare the necessary monitoring, structure, and procedures.
• Shift/staffing design decides, for a service requiring seamless coverage such as 24/7/365, how many people to place in which time bands. Excess staff swells labor cost, while too few breaks down response at peaks or during failures and invites an SLA breach. It factors in overnight/holiday first response, reinforcement during busy hours, and multi-skilling (removing dependence on individuals) to cope with leave and attrition. "Work only one person can handle" is a single point of failure, resolved by building runbooks and training.