An Environment Strategy is required to provide a consistent, structured and proactive approach to managing the organisation’s technology environments. It establishes clear ownership, standards and governance while ensuring environments are available, stable, secure and fit for purpose when required. The strategy enables effective planning of environment demand and capacity, manages dependencies and competing priorities, reduces delivery risk and environment-related delays, and ensures infrastructure is used efficiently and cost-effectively.
Recommended/Suggested Sections
The sections below shouldn’t be seen as mandatory but listed to trigger the thought process on the importance and relevance to your organisation.
- Executive Summary
- Purpose of the strategy
- Key objectives
- Desired outcomes
- Scope
- Applications, platforms and environments covered
- Teams and programmes included
- In/out of scope
- Current State
- Existing environment landscape
- Current challenges and pain points
- Key risks and constraints
- Environment Principles
- Standardisation
- Automation
- Reusability
- Security
- Cost optimisation
- “Fit for purpose”
- Environment Model / Landscape
- Development
- Integration
- System Test
- UAT
- Pre-Production
- Production
- Purpose and characteristics of each
- Environment Ownership & Responsibilities
- Environment Management Team
- Development
- Testing
- Infrastructure
- Application teams
- Release Management
- Suppliers
- Environment Lifecycle Management
- Demand
- Provisioning
- Configuration
- Deployment
- Refresh
- Decommissioning
- Environment Demand & Capacity Planning
- How requirements are identified
- Forward planning against the delivery roadmap
- Capacity management
- Shared vs dedicated environments
- Environment Provisioning & Configuration
- Build standards
- Infrastructure
- Application versions
- Configuration management
- Infrastructure as Code / automation
- Test Data & Integration Management
- Test data requirements
- Data refreshes
- Interfaces and dependencies
- External systems and services
- Environment Availability & Support
- Monitoring
- Health checks
- Incident management
- Support model
- SLAs / service expectations
- Change & Release Management
- Environment changes
- Deployment coordination
- Release calendars
- Change controls
- Freeze periods
- Security & Access
- Access management
- Credentials and certificates
- Data protection
- Security controls
- Governance
- Environment standards
- Request and approval processes
- Ownership
- Compliance
- Reporting
- Cost & Resource Optimisation
- Cloud costs
- Environment sizing
- Utilisation
- Automatic shutdown
- Decommissioning
- Automation & Continuous Improvement
- Automated provisioning
- Automated health checks
- Self-service
- Monitoring and alerting
- Opportunities for improvement
- Metrics & Definition of Success
- Environment availability
- Environment-related test delays
- Provisioning lead time
- Incident volumes
- Utilisation
- Cost savings
- Customer/team satisfaction
- Risks, Issues & Dependencies
- Key strategic risks
- Constraints
- Dependencies
- Mitigations
- Roadmap
- Current state → target state
- Immediate priorities
- 3/6/12-month improvements
- Longer-term ambition
- Appendices
- Environment catalogue
- Environment diagrams
- RACI
- Standards
- Definitions
- Supporting technical information
A subset of these can be used to provide a summary for senior stakeholders. How you present this depends on your organisations tools of choice. Personally I like this detailed and searchable in full within something like confluence. Any standards such as naming, sizing, ingress patterns etc I usually like to duplicate and make sure they are signed off by the technical design authority and stored along with other architecture standards. I also find it useful to create a summarised version in PowerPoint or a tool that is is easily shared with senior management or presentation to other teams.
However, no matter how this is created or presented, the bullets above are the key thought provoking points that need to be considered as part of defining what effective environment management is for your organisation.