Operating Models: Platform Teams, SRE, Managed Services and Sovereign Operations

All courses / AI Operations / Module 5 / Chapter 21

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

Compare the recurring operating models by the scarcity each answers, what it trades and its typical strain
Assign the four owners of a service and say what each cannot delegate
Draft the six terms of an operations annex for a managed provider whose AI acts on the estate
Choose and record an operating model per service by criticality and sovereignty need

Key concepts

Operating model: The answer to four questions about every service: who runs it, who owns it, who may act on it and who is called when it fails. It is decided per service, not per organisation, and recorded with its exit criteria.
Four owners: The service owner, who cannot delegate risk acceptance and the exit decision; the objective owner, who holds the freeze decision; the runbook owner, who signs off a level change for the runbook; and the agent owner, who holds the mandate and the stop.
Operations annex: The contract terms for a managed provider with AI inside: levels and action classes, sampling, audit rights, evidence per action, tuning and test rights, and notice of model change, with a stop right and an observer outside the provider's platform.
Operations conductor: The accountable role, a charter and not a title, that holds the loop together: it knows what the agents may do, verifies where the mandate requires, keeps manual operation in practice and holds the right to stop. It decides nothing about a named person's access to work.
Two evidenced holders per window: The rule that each window needs at least two conductors with evidence of their competence; with fewer, Level 3 classes fall back to Level 2 for that window.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Interactive exercise 1 · Match

Which scarcity each model answers

Match each operating model with the scarcity it answers, as the chapter's table gives it.

Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario

The annex is signed

Apply what the chapter says about relying on a contract right.

Teaching plan

15 min	The teacher presents the models with the table of scarcity, trade and strain, and Conway's observation on why the organisation shapes the system.
15 min	Presentation of the three things AI changes: smaller loops with larger scope per person, the agent team as a platform product, and what ownership means when systems hold service credentials.
15 min	Participants map the four owners onto a managed service and mark which owners straddle the contract.
35 min	Exercise: participants draft an operations annex for a provider.
10 min	Debrief using the reading aid for choosing a model by criticality and sovereignty need.

Discussion

The chapter says a contract right is a promise until it has been used. Which rights in your provider contracts have never been exercised, and what would a first use look like?
A national shared operator is both a remedy for scarce skill and a concentration. How should an authority that depends on one test that dependency?
What should the charter of an operations conductor say so that the role does not drift into supervising people?

Written exercise

Exercise · 35 minutes

An operations annex for a managed provider

For a provider that monitors or operates part of your estate, or SamDrift's monitoring and paging service for Nordvik Region, draft the annex. Begin with the written question to the provider: which AI acts in the service, on which action classes, at which model or rule version and in which location. Then write the six terms: action classes with levels, a quarterly sample of remediations and suppressed alerts with the evidence used, audit rights, the fields of a record per action, the right to narrow rules and to inject authorised seeded faults, and notice before any change affecting suppression, correlation, remediation or paging. Add the stop right in your own identity provider and the first sample, seeded fault and stop test with dates.

Deliverable: A draft annex with the six terms, a stop right outside the provider's platform, and a dated plan for the first sample, seeded fault and stop test.

Your work

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

What does the table of operating models give as the typical strain of a managed provider?
Show the answer
B. Provider AI acts under its own rules, and exit is hard
A managed provider answers the scarcity of night, weekend and specialist cover and trades visibility and control. Its strain is that the provider's AI acts under its own rules and exit is hard; the other strains belong to SRE, follow-the-sun and embedded teams.
What can the agent owner not delegate, according to the table of four owners?
Show the answer
C. The mandate and the stop
The agent owner holds the mandate of the agent, its identity and credentials, its evaluation and its budget, and cannot delegate the mandate and the stop. The other answers belong to the objective, service and runbook owners.
How does Hansa Mutual's operating model answer the risk committee's question on how far the agent's autonomy may reach?
Show the answer
A. The level is set per service and per window, capped at Level 2 where the window has fewer than two evidenced conductors
The operating model gives the first answer: per service and per window, with a cap at Level 2 wherever fewer than two evidenced conductors hold the window, and the provider's AI brought under the six terms before its scope widens.