Operational service readiness
Operational service readiness makes sure that new or significantly changed services are safe and secure, and meet Defra's requirements for managing live services.
Operational service readiness makes sure that new or significantly changed services are safe and secure, and meet Defra's requirements for managing live services.
This assurance protects the integrity of live environments by ensuring services are introduced consistently and compliantly to the Defra estate. It enables service mapping and dependency understanding while supporting teams in achieving outcomes.
What the operational service readiness team does
The team ensures operational and business readiness by:
- understanding user needs and technical solutions
- engaging appropriate stakeholders
- confirming supplier contracts
- ensuring support documentation is complete
- following governance processes
They compile findings into a service operations guide documenting components and lifecycle support.
Operational service design review board
The review board is mandatory assurance. It typically occurs at the start of beta phase, before services go live.
The board comprises function specialists who verify that we can operate a reliable end-to-end service and meet point 14 of the Service Standard.
Each delivery group receives an operational service readiness manager and live services manager to guide them through assurance and secure operation.
Information needed by phase
Any development stage using live data
- Complete security assurance pack
- Provide support team contact details
Private beta
- Update security pack
- Create ticket workflows
- Upload configuration to MyIT
- Define change models
Public beta
- Complete MyIT documentation
- Integrate dev tools
- Configure dashboards
Pre-live
- Designate MyIT contact
- Populate support queues
- Conduct incident rehearsals
- Establish 24/7 support protocols