What Can Brown (and David Lee Roth) Do For You?

For this post I’m looking to the unlikely world of rock ’n roll for wisdom about how to improve IT system quality and performance. 

VH: Operational Excellence Experts and Rock n Roll HOF MembersA while back I read a great article by Dan and Chip Heath in “Fast Company” that surprisingly held out Van Halen as an example for how to spot early warning signs of operational business problems. You see, in their concert contracts VH included a clause requiring a bowl of M&Ms backstage with all the brown ones removed. Checking the M&Ms when they arrived gave them a quick way to determine whether arena managers were paying close attention to the contract, which included a lot of specific requirements for their complex stage set.

IT production operations has its brown M&Ms too—seemingly small things that can be signs of bigger problems under the covers. For example, a well-maintained cabling plant is indicative of a well-managed data center.  A DC where the cabling looks like an exploded spaghetti factory, in my experience, is likely to have more serious issues such as unmanaged power and cooling capacity.  Are you experiencing occasional brief networks slowdowns that mysteriously go away without any action taken?  A brown M&M that is probably indicative of bigger problems with network monitoring and management.  Getting the occasional random error message when hitting submit?  Possibly a clue that larger application or infrastructure issues lay beneath the covers.

As IT professionals we should always be on the lookout for brown M&Ms, and working to eliminate the underlying problems that give rise to them.  It's too easy to just let these seemingly little things go.  In our book “Achieving IT Service Quality: The Opposite of Luck,” we call overlooking these issues the "Ostrich Postulate".   Ignore them at your own peril because they’ll hit you harder as major incidents somewhere farther down the road.  We also get into great detail about how to measure and incident performance to find, eliminate and ultimately prevent brown M&M’s.  Like we always say, there’s no substitute for clean living when it comes to meeting your quality objectives. -Mike Hagan-