Resilience Planning & Management Essentials

Overview

This 2-day programme (formerly, Operations Management Essentials for Application Services) will cover the essentials of real-world resilience planning and operations management to ensure the smooth running of production applications. It will include proactive best practices to avoid application incidents (whether big or small), and best practices to quickly resolve and minimise the impact should incidents occur.

With the growing dependence of organisations on IT applications for critical business functions, effective resilience planning & management is increasingly important, as incidents can have major widespread adverse impact (e.g. highly publicised system issues for some Singapore organisations, such as banks and even government agencies, in recent years).

The programme will be helpful to all ICT and SS staff whose work will impact BAU SLAs (e.g. availability, online response time etc) and who will be affected by any incidents that occur – e.g. product/project managers, business analysts, solution architects, development and ops managers, development teams, operations teams, DevOps teams etc.

The programme will start with real-world best practices to manage and resolve incidents quickly and effectively (even for difficult incidents such as Circle Line signal system incident which was only finally resolved effectively by one party, after unsuccessful attempts by many other experts from diverse organisations over a 2-month period).  

More importantly, the programme will then progress to more proactive resilience management methods that will help reduce the occurrence of incidents in the first place – for example, aspects covered include how to prepare the system and processes so as to avoid high-impact issues such as:

• poor performing systems due to high transaction volumes e.g. during popular launches (e.g. highly-anticipated new government programmes that many citizens rush to sign up upon launch – similar to concert bookings for popular international stars and the related publicised system failures which we wish to avoid). 
• unavailability of systems e.g. due to poor design or processes that causes the system to go down.
• high-impact functional errors e.g. due to poor system change management that allow such errors to get into production.

These are the key resilience issues that we commonly find publicised and hence, are very critical to avoid.

The resilience management practices covered will include international best practices such as those adopted by Google, Netflix and also lessons learnt from high-impact failures from commercial organisations and other governments etc.

The programme will also touch on how to properly utilise latest practices such as DevSecOps to help enable some of the proactive practices to benefit yourself – i.e. make it more automated, streamlined, complete, thorough, and efficient.

This includes key pointers on how to properly and optimally use tools already available in the government -- such as Ship-Hats, StackOps, Elastic Agent, Service Maps, Selenium etc. – to help yourself to greatly improve resilience, and make resilience management more automated, streamlined and effective.

(Note for those who have taken ITIL programmes, this programme is also a good complement as it extends the ITIL learning with linkage to current real-world industry best practices.)

Some comments from past participants for this programme:

• “All the content is applicable to my day to day work. It helps to ground my knowledge and understanding of practical ops management.”
• “Chance to learn many new operations-related concepts for future projects.”
• “The contents were great - so much covered in a short time.”