"When describing my journey in IT Operations, I could divide them into two very pronounced phases: There was the BEFORE and the AFTER.

"The BEFORE phase was when I would found myself and my team constantly reacting to requests from other departments and having to resolve 'pressing' situations asap!! We always worked on our tasks and yet we couldn't catch up on our backlog. We’d start each year with lofty department goals but could never fully complete them. I thought that in order for us to reach our ideal state, we needed to hire more people, automate our processes and start a ‘DevOps’ movement.

What we really needed, however, was an ideology change: Move from 'Reactive IT' to 'Proactive IT'.

The AFTER phase when I decided and successfully built a Self-Service Provisioning Portal. This was the proactive system that did the reacting for us; a system that outsourced the tasks without outsourcing the team.

Provisioning full-scale environments were imperative to our development team and our organization's success. I wanted to give those teams and its Application Owners the environments they needed without putting our team under duress.

I developed a system where the IT Team could maintain full control of all systems and environments provisioned by the portal, as well as management of the resources, the configurations and security all without the need to do any provisioning themselves!

It freed up our cycles to handle our other responsibilities, it enabled the ability for the development teams and application owners to provision on-demand and speed up software development productivity.

Sometimes all you need is a simple Ideology change! I’d like to give you the opportunity to become more Proactive and offer you the steps I used to implement Self-service in your organization."