// DIGITAL SERVICE OPERATIONS HEALTHCHECK

How do your service operations measure up?

A holistic assessment of your service operations against practical experience of 'what good looks like' in high-performing digital organisations.

IMAGE: PHOTO BY FERENC ALMASI ON UNSPLASH

// INTRODUCING THE HEALTHCHECK

An end-to-end view of how your services are run.

Many organisations understand their service operations could be improved, yet fewer understand what is holding them back or what needs fixing first.

In our Digital Service Operations Healthcheck, we assess how your services are actually run against a lived-experience backdrop of 'what good looks like' in a high performing digital organisation.

We work alongside your teams throughout the review, using interviews, workshops, observation and operational data to baseline operational performance and shape opportunities for improvement. At the end of the engagement, you will understand what good looks like for you and the roadmap to achieve it. The healthcheck sits within our service operations transformation practice, and we can lead the improvement work as well as identify it.

// WHY YOU SHOULD ACT NOW

Operations effectiveness is now a key differentiator in business performance

Research into software delivery and operational performance shows that organisations that deliver efficiently and offer great service experiences significantly outperform those that don't. For many organisations, achieving high performance means fundamentally re-thinking how service management is carried out. Our healthcheck helps you understand where you sit and where you need to get to.

$2m

Median cost of a high-impact outage, per hour. The annual median runs to $76m.

76%

Of outages involve failures that were detectable before users were affected.

½

Organisations with full-stack observability report roughly half the outage cost of those without.

46–60%

Of changes fail in low performers. Elite performers sit at 15% or below — speed and stability rise together.

SOURCES: NEW RELIC 2025 OBSERVABILITY FORECAST · GARTNER · DORA STATE OF DEVOPS 2024

// CORE ASSESSMENT PILLARS

The 6 pillars of our assessment

A holistic assessment of service performance, from operating model through to how services are managed in production.

01

Service experience

How service management fits the organisation, how user-centric it is, and whether it genuinely enables agility.

ITSM capabilitiesPlatform thinkingIncident & problemMetrics & reportingSupplier managementContinuous improvement
02

Path to production, change and release management

How services are built, tested and released, and how change is governed on the way through — consistent, repeatable and low-risk.

Automation & CDTesting & assuranceEngineering standardsDeployment strategiesChange managementRelease managementRisk-based controlsCriteria for production
03

Reliability, performance, operability and recoverability

Whether services are engineered for the realities of production — decoupled, observable, scalable — and whether recovery has been proven rather than documented.

Cloud architectureObservabilitySLIs & SLOsResiliency & scaleAIOpsService riskRecoverability & BCDRRecovery testing coverage
04

Estate control

What is in the estate, who owns it, what it is composed of — including the third-party and open-source components you depend on.

Asset management & CMDBTechnology lifecycleLicensingEOSL policyOpen source managementThird-party risk management
05

Security

A secure-by-design posture, verified in the build rather than inspected afterwards. An insecure service is not a reliable one.

Control frameworkSecure software engineeringThreat modellingSecuring productionSIEM & detection
06

AI in service operations

Where AI can improve triage, correlation and self-service — and whether you can govern, monitor and support the AI services and models you already run.

AI in triage & correlationSelf-serviceAIOps & automationModel & service inventoryAI governanceMonitoring AI in production

// THE APPROACH

Typically executed in 4 weeks

WEEK 0

Pre-engagement

Confirming participants, roles and terms of reference, starting the comms, and requesting the initial data sets and tooling access. Handled before the four weeks begin.

WEEK 1

Conduct assessments

Kick-off, then we guide your teams through the data collection templates, run interviews and workshops, and observe how the processes and tooling are used in practice.

WEEK 2

Analysis

Collection and analysis of the data and tooling output, reconciled through cross-functional stand-ups, with outstanding data sets and gaps chased down.

WEEK 3

Recommendations

We build out the recommendations and assumptions, iterate the report with the cross-functional team, and start the improvement backlog.

WEEK 4

Reporting and review

We review the draft with senior stakeholders, agree priorities and ownership for remediation, then finalise the report.

// WHAT YOU GET

A prioritised, actionable roadmap for improvement

The final deliverable is a report and presentation for senior stakeholders. Independent, impartial, and specific to your organisation.

01

An assessment against each pillar

Where you stand on all six pillars, with supporting evidence and a viewpoint of target maturity levels appropriate for your organisation.

02

Key pain points and problem areas

The problems identified in the review, including how they manifest now plus likely issues in future unless addressed.

03

Prioritised recommendations

What to address, in what sequence, to achieve target maturity levels, along with justification.

04

A sequenced improvement roadmap

A sequenced improvement plan, with proposed owners and rationalised for dependencies and volume of parallel change.

// LET'S TALK

Find out where your operations really stand.

Tell us how your services are run today and we will scope a healthcheck around the areas that matter most to you.