The How & Why of Minimum Viable Runbooks

What is a Minimum Viable Runbook?

In IT Process development, the minimum viable runbook (MVR) is the runbook with the highest return on valuable information versus time spent creating it. It is a strategy and process directed toward making and implementing runbooks for your IT team. It is an iterative process of idea generation, prototyping, automation, presentation, information capturing, analysis and learning.

Why do you need one?

1. Your teams are busy. There is little value in carving out time to have a dedicated team member build runbooks, design processes and gather information from previous successes when you have 24×7 operations that need their attention.

2. Incidents are inevitable, outages are unforeseeable, and frustration can quickly become an internal IT cultural norm. Thus, runbooks are important in providing your teams with contextual documents to support their efforts.