Home
Operational reviews are the practice of regularly gathering metrics with your teams, in a cohesive way across your organization, to drive positive business outcomes. When transforming digital practices, many organizations struggle to quantify and measure their progress in meaningful ways. By gathering and learning from metrics on a regular cadence at every organizational level—practitioner, management, and executive—teams can make better data-driven decisions around improving work in ways that align daily practices with long-term business results. This guide shows you how to build that practice at each organizational level.
Who Is This For?#
This guide is for digital business leaders who want to create a cohesive strategy around capturing metrics that both quantify and drive organizational change. If you’re driving the adoption of DevOps principles, guiding a digital transformation, or driving greater operational maturity—as a team manager, department/division leader, or an executive—then these docs are for you.
Anyone who is part of a technical team that manages real-time operations (for example, a digital service that may experience unplanned incidents) will also find this documentation useful, including software engineers who go on call, technical program managers, agile coaches, or anyone else whose job involves leading change and implementing effective processes. Ultimately, we encourage you to share this documentation with all of your teams rather than siloing this information or letting it live solely in the realm of management. Driving organizational change requires transparency, autonomy, accountability, and—above all—knowledge-sharing.
What Is Covered?#
What Are Operational Reviews?#
Operational reviews are the practice of regularly gathering metrics with your teams, in a cohesive way across your organization, to drive positive business outcomes. When transforming digital practices, many organizations struggle to quantify and measure their progress in meaningful ways. By gathering and learning from metrics on a regular basis at every organizational level—practitioner, management, and executive—teams can make better data-driven decisions around improving work in ways that align daily practices with long-term business results.
On-Call Review#
At the practitioner level, this review happens directly with responders that run your real-time operations and helps you catch any problems before they become trends or contribute to significant negative impact.
- Cadence
- Scope
- Meeting owner and attendees
- Metrics
- Conducting the review
- Taking action
- Notes and considerations
Service Review#
At the department or division level, these reviews happen with management and they provide an opportunity to spot trends and take any necessary corrective actions before negative impacts become broader and potentially more damaging.
- Cadence
- Scope
- Meeting owner and attendees
- Metrics
- Conducting the review
- Taking action
- Notes and considerations
Business Review#
At the leadership level, this review helps executives identify the results of organizational transformation efforts. Typically a component of quarterly business reviews, it serves to create alignment between technical teams and leadership by highlighting investments or initiatives that are needed to help achieve desired business outcomes.
- Cadence
- Scope
- Meeting owner and attendees
- Metrics
- Conducting the review
- Taking action
- Notes and considerations
Definitions#
A glossary of terms used throughout this guide.
Next Steps#
Although the above practices are effective on any platform, it can help to see how these concepts are applied in practice. This section shows how PagerDuty can be used to practice the steps recommended in this guide.
Additional Resources#
Links to additional reading to help you get started with operational reviews.
License#
This documentation is provided under the Apache License 2.0. In plain English, that means you can use and modify this documentation and use it both commercially and for private use. However, you must include any original copyright notices and the original LICENSE file.
Whether you are a PagerDuty customer or not, we want you to have the ability to use this documentation internally at your own company. You can view the source code for all of this documentation on our GitHub account; feel free to fork the repository and use it as a base for your own internal documentation.