Think of runbooks as your reference guide when handling mission-critical IT incidents, that ensure you don't waste time doing the same thing over and over again and are right in the first go. Starting from SSL certificates to patching servers, these runbooks can streamline regular tasks and troubleshooting, minimize downtime, and keep operations seamless.
Research indicates that technical employees dedicate a significant portion of their workday searching for information or seeking clarity from colleagues during serious IT incidents.
Worried that these are your employees and their time is being wasted?
Don't fret!
Runbooks can come to your rescue.
Just like any other book, Runbooks are the kind of books that can benefit people, organizations, and industries. These are utilized across various sectors but are especially renowned in IT and DevOps circles. Imagine a seasoned expert guiding you at each step during critical times, that’s what runbooks are.
Think of runbooks as your reference guide when handling mission-critical IT incidents, that ensure you don't waste time doing the same thing over and over again and are right in the first go. Starting from SSL certificates to patching servers, these runbooks can streamline regular tasks and troubleshooting, minimize downtime, and keep operations seamless.
When it comes to employees searching for information, runbooks are a paradigm shift. They cut down on wasted time and boost productivity, ultimately benefiting the company's bottom line.
There are two types of runbooks as per their functions: General & Specialized.
General Runbook: This rulebook covers general IT tasks of the day. For example, daily backups, system maintenance, operational issues, etc which help efficiently manage their day across different departments in the organization.
Specialized Runbook: This rulebook deals with complex issues and challenges. For example, hardware failures, security breaches, crisis management, etc such challenges are addressed with proactive security systems against potential emergencies.
While this is the general differentiation, runbooks are also differentiated based on automation levels.
Manual Runbook: Provides step-by-step actions for operators, including tools needed.
Semi-automated Runbook: Combines actions of the operator with automated tasks executable on the system.
Fully-automated Runbook: Operates independently without the need for operator intervention.
Creating a good runbook is a step-by-step process. Understand and write down the objective of the runbook, and what it is supposed to address with clarity providing, easy-to-follow steps for anyone.
Complement each step with the necessary tools/resources required for it.
Over and above this, keep updating the runbook as per the technology or processes, to ensure relevancy and effectiveness. And after everything, involve different eyes from the team to validate it once before you release it.
Runbooks & Playbooks: In IT sectors, runbooks and playbooks serve completely different roles.
Playbook: This comprises bigger business strategies and predefined responses for various scenarios. It also covers basic processes needed by the team like workflows, standard procedures, and aligns with organizational values to ensure consistent operation.
Runbook: In a playbook, runbooks are specific components that take you through procedures for execution or managing incidents, in detail. For instance, a network infrastructure playbook might include a runbook specifically for responding to network outages, with detailed steps for diagnosing the issue.
While people might use one word instead of the other, runbooks focus on specific IT functions and playbooks extend beyond IT into other business areas like sales and HR. Runbooks also vary in automation levels - manual, semi-automated, and fully automated, depending upon the complexity of the tasks.
By now you must have already assessed the advantages of having a team runbook that can help in preparing & managing IT operations. We’ll still help you with more advantages of it.
Anticipating Incidents: Having a runbook on the table can prepare your teams for unforeseen events. Wondering how? A detailed step-by-step procedure in a runbook helps in identifying and managing incidents early and ensuring readiness.
Cost Efficiency: Imagine a high IT incident where you face disruptions and bottlenecks and have all the information scattered. Panicking, right? Having a well-crafted runbook with clear instructions at such peak times can enable both technical and non-technical staff to contribute to minimizing disruptions.
Enhanced IT Maintenance: Those monotonous routine IT tasks that use up your significant bandwidth- what if we tell you a runbook can automate it? Tasks such as system updates, data backups, and performance monitoring can be fully monitored with continuous operations without manual intervention.
Improved Productivity and Customer Satisfaction: Runbooks also speed up the resolution processes. From resetting passwords, and computer software replacement, to running performance checks, whatever the service issue is, teams can respond more proactively ensuring a better retention rate.
Revenue Growth and Cost Savings: Whatever we talked about in the above point (improved customer satisfaction) directly leads to positive revenue. When you keep on delivering a good customer experience repeatedly, people will start to build trust in you. This invites a good proportion of new acquisitions and fosters more profitability.
Regular Updates: To ensure accuracy on any document or playbook, regular updation is mandatory otherwise it's a waste of effort to even create those in the first place. Similarly, a runbook, when regularly updated with new processes and solutions, ensures efficient resolutions and support. Over and above optimizing IT operations, this also boosts org-level efficiency and increases happy customers.
Step 1: Assess Your IT Landscape
Take a look around, take a hard look once again. How do your IT operations and services look like and where do you need runbooks? Understand the full landscape and then write down the scope of work.
Step 2: Identify Pain Points
Done with step 1? Now open your detailed incident reports and uncover recurring issues and critical incidents that impact operations or finances. This will help you identify what can go wrong before it actually does and give you a heads up before a havoc.
Step 3: Document Existing Processes
If you don't have your processes documented, do it right away. This will help you resolve current issues instantly and then you can crack what more to do as you move ahead. Trust us, just the documentation can solve more issues than you expect. Also, this will help in saving your effort because you will be avoiding reinventing the wheel.
Step 4: Prioritize Tasks
Strategize your runbook creation before you actually create it. Think about what are the most frequent and critical incidents that can be solved and which can bring the most goodness. Decide this first and plan a phase-by-phase approach that can boost productivity and bring the maximum benefits.
Step 5: Define Your Audience
Now, documenting will come later. Before the actual documentation, think about your target audience, research and define their persona. Understanding the end-user and then working on a runbook as per their expertise makes more sense than randomly starting to build.
Step 6: Choose the Right Tool
It's important for a brand to maintain consistency in terms of style, font, colors, etc. So work on a set of brand guidelines with a strong set of dos/don'ts and if you have that already in place, start using it to create your professional-looking runbooks. Once this is ready, then choose the right tool to generate it.
Step 7: Design a Template
Post choosing the content, design, and flow elements, you can proceed with selecting a template. This template should remain consistent across all your runbooks. While the runbooks can flow organically as per the requirements, some things should remain standardized such as Task ID, Task Name & Description, Tips, Executing Team, Task Owner, Duration, Status, etc.
Finalize a template, cross-check it multiple times, and ensure that it consists of all mandatory elements. This not only streamlines operations but also enhances the clarity and efficiency of your IT processes.
Step 8: Create User-Friendly Content
This step is directly linked to jumping in the reader’s shoes and then working on a runbook with step-by-step instructions. Consider putting screenshots linked with easy-to-understand steps, necessary notes, etc. This can help users in consuming the information in the best way possible.
Step 9: Include Essential Information
Your runbook template should contain all pertinent details to enhance your IT operations:
Each runbook should also feature:
Step 10: Set Up Notifications
Now that you are done with the creation part of it, make it easier to access during havoc situations. Create prompt access to it and ensure everyone on the team is aware. Stepping up these triggers so that your creation effort is utilized at the time of need.
Step 11: Rigorous Testing
Let’s accept it - first drafts are never perfect. And without testing, it’s difficult to imagine an accurate runbook that can save you during serious incidents. Keep in mind these two things while testing:
Step 12: Gather Feedback
As they say, ‘Feedback is the breakfast of achievements’. This applied to your runbook creation process as well. So IT team or non-IT team, go out and collect as much feedback as possible to ensure your runbook is seamless and valuable. Don’t stop this even after publishing it. Keep doing it every once in a while to stay on top of the market and maintain consistency in efficiency.
Step 13: Regular Maintenance
The tech landscape is forever changing and to stay on top of it, your runbooks should also evolve with it. As and when an update/launch comes in that impacts your IT processes, it should reflect in your runbooks. Because no one wants to deal with new-age problems using old-age methods. If tech changes, a lot of operations change too and that also is a crucial part of a runbook.
Remember, it's an ongoing effort and not a one-time activity for your organization. Don’t forget to replace older versions with updated versions and ensure ease of accessibility to the team.
Smooth operations can be easily enabled with effective IT runbooks and playbooks but only if you avoid some common pitfalls. Let’s look at some common mistakes that you can avoid.
Imagine facing IT havoc in your organization and when you look for runbooks/playbooks to calm the situation down, you realize that details are outdated and cannot be used to resolve your incidents. Sounds terrible, right?
Keep your books updated and you won’t land yourself in a situation like this.
To tackle serious incidents, internal teams must have detailed briefs and instructions to resolve them. Hence, your runbooks should consist of all kinds of information supported with screenshots, detailed steps, references, etc.
There are two sides to a runbook- the creation side and the experiential side. What you create isn’t necessarily experienced the same way by the IT operators. Hence, regular feedbacks are a must to identify usability issues and areas for improvement.
Inconsistent formats and styles can throw people off, especially IT teams during incidents. Work on creating a synergy between all runbooks and playbooks in terms of fonts, colors, patterns, tone of voice, etc, and look at your operations streamlining graph going up and up and up.
What if the steps in your runbooks start giving your IT team errors during a critical incident? Pretty annoying, right?
You can avoid this pitfall with the help of regular testing and enable risk-free operations. Actively validate the data, steps, details, and identify the errors to avoid this mistake.
Now that you are aware of common mistakes to avoid, you are ready to embrace a culture of continuous improvement and support excellence across your organization.
If you are still here, by now you know the nitty-gritty of creating runbooks. Remember that it isn’t just about documenting procedures, it’s also about empowering the teams to handle challenges efficiently. Other than this, if you avoid common pitfalls and religiously follow the steps above, nothing can stop your team from handling the constantly evolving tech landscape.
Embark on the runbook journey to learn from every experience, empowering your organization with streamlined operations for lasting efficiency. Start optimizing with Documentations.ai today!
Improved coordination, efficient operational procedures, effective handling of critical situations, elevated team collaboration, and the list goes on and on and on.
Best Practices: Regular updates, easy-to-understand documentation, feedback inputs from users, testing and retesting, etc
Easy-peasy! Just ensure to update it at a required frequency, encourage continuous improvement, and conduct periodic tests.
A runbook should be as clear as water with detailed steps, elaborated procedures linked with relevant tools, contact information, and any relevant documentation essential for handling incidents.
The creation process of a runbook includes steps such as Planning, Research, Documentation, Testing & Updates.