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OPS01 - How do you determine what your priorities are?

Best Practices

OPS01-BP01 BP01 - Evaluate external customer needs OPS01-BP02 BP02 - Evaluate internal customer needs OPS01-BP03 BP03 - Evaluate governance requirements OPS01-BP04 BP04 - Evaluate compliance requirements OPS01-BP05 BP05 - Evaluate threat landscape OPS01-BP06 BP06 - Evaluate tradeoffs while managing benefits and risks

Best Practices

This question includes the following best practices:

Key Concepts

Strategy and Governance

Business outcomes: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.

Stakeholder mapping: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.

Risk-based prioritization: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.

Operational Execution

Data-driven decision making: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.

Governance mechanisms: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.

Review cadence: Use this concept to guide architecture and operating decisions for this question area. Define measurable targets, assign clear ownership, and review results regularly against expected business outcomes.

Implementation Approach

1. Define outcomes and constraints

  • Document measurable business outcomes for the workload
  • Map legal, regulatory, and contractual constraints
  • Identify critical user journeys and service level targets
  • Set explicit risk tolerance with leadership and product owners

2. Assess current state

  • Perform a Well-Architected baseline review
  • Inventory technical debt and operational pain points
  • Quantify current reliability, security, and cost performance
  • Rank issues by impact, urgency, and dependency

3. Prioritize and plan

  • Build a prioritized improvement backlog with owners
  • Sequence work into near-term and long-term milestones
  • Define success metrics and leading indicators per initiative
  • Integrate priorities into sprint and release planning

4. Review and adapt

  • Review business and architecture priorities regularly
  • Adjust roadmap based on incidents and new requirements
  • Publish progress through dashboards and leadership updates
  • Retire completed or low-value initiatives

AWS Services to Consider

AWS Well-Architected Tool

Captures workload reviews, risks, and improvement plans so teams can continuously track architecture quality.

Amazon CloudWatch

Collects metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards so teams can detect issues early and track operational outcomes.

AWS Organizations

Centralizes multi-account governance so you can apply policies, standards, and delegated administration consistently across workloads.

AWS Config

Tracks resource configuration changes and evaluates compliance against operational policies.

AWS Trusted Advisor

Surfaces recommendations for reliability, security, and performance improvements across your AWS environment.

Common Challenges and Solutions

Challenge: Conflicting stakeholder goals

Solution: Use explicit decision criteria tied to business outcomes and escalate tradeoffs through a governance forum.

Challenge: Too many competing initiatives

Solution: Apply impact-versus-effort scoring and focus first on high-risk, high-value items with clear ownership.

Challenge: Lack of objective evidence

Solution: Use shared dashboards and operational metrics to validate priority decisions instead of relying on opinion.

Related Resources