RunBook Creation Tips

Pastepile:

How to create a runbook for your small business

As you work through the five steps below to create your runbooks, keep the five As in mind:

• Actionable: Focus on defined actions, not theory.
• Accurate: Test and validate the content in each runbook.
• Authoritative: Have one runbook per process.
• Accessible: Make runbooks easily available.
• Adaptable: Review and update runbooks regularly.

Step 1: Plan

Careful planning is required to produce high-quality runbooks that provide the most help for day-to-day tasks and unexpected critical events.

Considerations include:

• Prioritize processes: Create your first runbooks for processes performed most frequently and with high error rates as well as events that pose the greatest operational and financial risks.
• Create a runbook template: Using a template ensures each runbook contains necessary information, including a process overview, process steps, technical documentation, personnel permissions and authorizations, escalation protocols, and required reporting and communications.

Each runbook must be comprehensive yet focused, and uniform content organization allows IT personnel to access information without delay.

Step 2: Research

Gather the necessary information for your runbook before you begin writing to streamline the writing process.

Information to generate includes:

• Procedures: Don’t write out processes from memory; instead, work through the process while taking notes and capturing screenshots to document every step.
• Documentation: Include hardware and software technical specifications, configuration information, network diagrams, and login credentials.
• Alerts: Identify the alerts and notifications that result in using the runbook.
• Permissions: Determine who is authorized to use the runbook and/or has the permissions required to execute it.
• Communications: Set up necessary reporting guidelines for runbook initiation, completion, and after action review (AAR).

A runbook template aids the research process because you’ll know up front what you need. You also avoid a start-and-stop writing process due to repeatedly backtracking to find yet another piece of critical information.

How to Create an Operations Runbook

An effective runbook should be easy to understand, consistent across all applications and departments, and accurate. This means that the best runbooks are living documents that are constantly evolving as systems are updated and new applications are introduced. When creating a runbook from scratch, it’s important to focus your efforts on the most essential tasks and the best way to identify those is through the use of detailed incident reports and postmortems.

Postmortems are a great place to start when creating a runbook as they should provide details on the timeline of the incidents and the ultimate conclusion of how the incident was successfully handled. By collecting and analyzing past postmortems, you can identify the most commonly occurring incidents and see which solutions were most effective at resolving the issues.

Runbooks can be adapted directly from postmortems but this doesn’t mean that they should replace them. Each incident will have unique aspects to it that won’t be addressed by the runbooks, and runbooks shouldn’t be bogged down by details unnecessary for accomplishing the outlined tasks.

Use the findings from your postmortems to build basic action plans that detail specific steps for resolving issues, such as who should be contacted when the issue occurs, where documentation for the system can be found, and other relevant details that will aid someone in resolving the issue. Your ticketing system should ideally serve relevant runbooks alongside the occurring incidents so the team member can take immediate action based on the information provided within. This improves the consistency of the runbook’s application while also reducing response time and resolution time for incidents.

Once you’ve created your runbook, put it to the test by using it to solve real-world issues and then analyze the results of its use. As we mentioned above, runbooks are living documents and should be in a constant state of improvement to ensure that tasks are optimized while taking into account new information and changes in the system’s structure that happen over time.

Optimization is an ongoing task that is impacted by events inside and outside your IT systems as new products are developed and different methods are implemented. Focusing your initial runbook creation efforts on the highest frequency issues will ensure you can measure the impact of your runbooks more effectively. Once you’ve nailed down the process, you can begin branching out to more nuanced runbook tasks.