Lean and Kanban for IT Operations: Quick and easy wins

If the situation is severe enough, you won't really have time to wait for the ultimate solution.  You need some quick and easy wins to buy yourself some breathing space first.

There are several of these kinds of tactics that generally work for IT Operations.  Note that I generally expect the team lead or even people external to the team to be doing this as the operations team members in severe situations will be busy enough just doing the work:

Create a single, prioritised request queue (and limit WIP!).  This includes walk-ups.  This removes any confusion about what everyone is supposed to be working on and provides focus.  As an example...

Clean up alerts.  Review and remove alerts that you can't actually do anything about as an incident response.  People should not be paged unless they can actually do something.  Aggressively address causes and root causes of incidents to remove them permanently.  A more manageable pager load means a more refreshed team and less mistakes that generate more problems.

Setup a problem board.  Anything that gets in your way or slows you down goes up on the problem board.  Capture frequency to prioritise what gets address first but otherwise aggressively contain then countermeasure.