Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps

188 total ratings, 72 with reviews

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From Canada

Centurion

Re-release this book!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

An excellent read on how to use the fundamentals of ITIL. It should be updated and re-released.

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shahram

Content not relevant anymore unfortunatly

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

What's suggested to do and follow in the book is too old, almost 50% or it is useless, they either should update or remove the book from the market, lots of bad advice, things that are not being practiced currently there are many newer methods available now

One person found this helpful

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From other countries

Shannon Gaw

Excellent whitepaper, weak book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 15, 2008

Verified Purchase

Visible Ops contains some good - though oft repeated - insight and information regarding ITIL and infrastructure support by consultants who have obviously spent some time in the trenches. Its premise is based on Gartner research stating that 80% of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues and 80% of the time spent in resolving downtime is unproductive and there are systems administration principles and activities that can mitigate. The problem with Visible Ops is that the volume of content warrants a whitepaper, yet the authors seemingly add filler to justify the $22 sales price.

The authors are one of the first to offer in print some solutions for infrastructure support that validate what IT infrastructure managers have been doing for years. The ideas of rebuild v. repair, "source control" of infrastructure builds, repeatable infrastructure build processes are right on. Yet instead of case studies and further exploration, we get multiple pages of testimonials, a forward, an introduction, a multiple-page TOC, a mere 40 pages of content which include repetition, constant summarization, and more testimonials, and 30 pages of appendices of largely copyrighted and incomplete material. As a final insult, there are ads on the front and back covers. At least one of the authors sells tools to remedy some of the problems mentioned in "Visible Ops" and it seems he is hedging his bets by charging for materials that should be marketing and product literature.

Why not give more detailed examples and case studies, expound on the CMDB, give some ideas on organizing builds or address other ITIL areas? This is *great* stuff here, but I feel like it has been cheapened. Regardless, I recommend "Visible Ops" because it addresses common and significant problems and solutions that are rarely addressed elsewhere.

8 people found this helpful

James Ausman

If You Only Have Time For One Book On Computer Operations, This Is It

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2010

Verified Purchase

After 15 years as a professional system administrator and manager, I thought I had seen all the good books on the subject, but I have never before seen a short summary of what usually goes wrong and how to fix your processes so that things stop breaking. This book is invaluable to getting everyone rowing in the same direction with understanding how and why complex computer systems break.

One of the things that is always hard to explain to both developers and management is the importance of managing change. It is almost always unplanned change that causes your major problems and Spafford explains this in a funny and accessible way. It is always a challange to "push back" at the business and make them understand the real cost of not having adequate testing and controls in place. This book really helped me both clarify your own thinking on the topic and make a good case to the developers and business owners. This book would especially be useful for someone who worked at a start-up or other unstructured environment and who didn't know where to start first.

I bought 15 copies and gave one to every programming manager at my job as well as all my direct reports. I with I had gotten more!

2 people found this helpful

Adrian W. Rich

Good Insights, Poor Delivery

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2008

Verified Purchase

This book was chock full of practical information and profound insights. It is obvious to me that the author team have a depth of knowledge and practical experience and the way in which they have framed the information is done so in a really useful way. With all the intelligence and experience bound up in this book, I am perplexed as to how they were convinced that the actual design of their product was somehow beneficial. I "get" that they wanted to make it a pocket reference and present it as a handy guide, but c'mon--has someone heard of Section 508 compliance [for those of us w/ visual and other sort of accessory impairments]? The material is almost inaccessible as the book is published in what appears to be 8pt. font. I started reading the book several times and had to put it down until I finally broke through the barrier of having got thru enough of the book to realize that the content actually made the migraine inducing fine print worthwhile. I think they've out-"cuted" themselves and yet I find myself endorsing the material as useful to pros interested in this field.

7 people found this helpful

B. K. Whittaker

Great content, but please run a spell check on the Kindle Version

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2012

Verified Purchase

This is a well written book for anybody tasked with getting IT operations running in a highly effective and efficient manner. I would rate this a must buy as it provides a short and sweet set of ideas that will help you get started even in the most challenged of IT operational sites. This book is easily 5-stars, but the Kindle version had so many typos that it became difficult to read at points. On a limited size Kindle page, there would often be 2-3 clearly misspelled words. Amazon or whoever is taking the hard copy books and creating these Kindle books should get its act together. It makes me wonder how many more books I will buy via Kindle.

3 people found this helpful

Jeremy M Page

Outstanding - If you are responsible for a data center or IT shop this is a must read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 10, 2009

Verified Purchase

I'm not huge on a one size fits all. In IT there is an exception to every rule, but The Visible Ops is something that could help any IT group. The eye opening statistic is that 80% of outages are operator induced. That's a huge number and obviously leaves a lot of room for improvement. This book goes over the basic steps that are required to stabilize and improve your data center. It's short (95) pages and offers an ITIL compliant framework for making your changes (or more specifically, stopping them from being made with out forethought). I started as a system administrator and I hate the idea of following procedures instead of "just fixing things".

Stability is what your customers look for in their computing environment as well as flexibility. Are you providing both?

M. Shuman

Very useful resource for

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 2, 2011

Verified Purchase

I found this book to be a very valuable resource to getting to the meat of implementing ITIL processes. I have been through ITIL training and am certified in v3, but the training and books don't propose a clear path for getting a return on your efforts quickly. The company I was working for at the time used this book as a road map and gained immediate returns in terms of reducing errors and systems downtime. Result: happy customers. It's a quick read and for a slim volume, has a lot of "bang" per page.

Pete

Well worth considering

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 6, 2008

Verified Purchase

I have long been a believer that books are to be shared. I spent a lot on this book with a weird format and less than 100 pages, and since I have done that, I have struggled to keep my hands on it.

In an organisation that is trying had to follow the ITIL framework, most of my colleagues are familiar with the principles, and applying them in practice. This book presents a simple way for those people to see real results quickly, and clarified things in a simple way for non ITIL trained people.

It's expensive, and the paper back was really bad quality, but I would still recommend the book (and yes, I have bought a couple of new versions for the library).

One person found this helpful

Daniel L Jackman

Paperback print is way to small. No ePub version avail.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

I'm finding all kinds of good stuff, but the print is so small and jammed in edge to edge it is hard to read. First actual book I've bought in a long time. Wanted to read it and there was no ePub version I could find anywhere.

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From Canada

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From other countries

The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and...

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