Technical Operations Guide

Use the technology to serve the HS Agency mission, keep it operating efficiently, and continuously collect and analyze data to identify opportunities for improvement.

This guide defines the key activities, artifacts, and roles that are necessary to operate and sustain the deployed IT products, to gather information on their use, and to aid in their evolution within the usage environments. This entails administering to the operational needs of the products (database, user, network, security, or application administration).

See the Organization of the IT Planning and Management Guides for the relationship of the processes described in this guide to those of the other guides. Background is provided on the fundamental concepts and principles that apply across the guides. For information on how to customize this guidance, view the Application of the IT Planning and Management Guides pages.

Processes

The actions to operate and sustain the technology are achieved through one or more technical operations projects. Projects form the context for organizing, planning, executing, and tracking activities to keep the technology operating efficiently and effectively. Projects may specialize on a portion of the technology (networking, data, application), by site-location, HS program, or other, as necessary to direct and track actions and associated costs. Operations, fabrication, and deployment projects are coordinated with one another within and across plateaus by the IT Evolution Plan.

The common top-level activities are illustrated in the figure and described in the text below. Each operational project would consist of a mix of one or more of these activities.

• Project Management Activities - These activities include practices necessary to plan, monitor, control, and terminate technical operations projects.
• Engineering Activities - These activities include technical life-cycle practices needed to operate and sustain the technology elements in the usage environments.
• Acquisition Activities - These activities include those life-cycle practices needed to acquire or replenish any deployed products or obtain vendor-provided services necessary to keep the technical assets operational.
• Support Activities - These activities include those life-cycle practices needed to establish a project environment supporting the other three sets of activities. This includes CM and QA practices.

Technical Operations Guide Resources - A consolidated set of items that can be used to implement the activities defined in this guide are listed in the consolidated resources.