Operational Readiness Review Template

Towards Operational Excellence

I want to express my gratitude to my colleagues and friends Ricardo Sueiras, Matt Fitzerald, and Boaz Ziniman for their valuable feedback.

Since I published my blog series Towards Operational Excellence, I received a relatively large amount of feedback and requests. One, in particular, stood out:

“Can you share an operational excellence review template?”

Operational Readiness Review

In this blog post, I will share with you my “lightweight” (but not so lightweight) Operational Readiness Review (ORR) template.

An ORR is a rigorous, evidence-based assessment that evaluates a particular service’s operational state and is often very specific to a specific company, its culture, and its tools. Yet, ORRs all have the same goal: help you find blind spots in your operations.

This template, which I hope will help you get started, is based on my two-decades of experience writing application software, deploying servers, and managing large-scale architectures. I have…