When you look at the most innovative companies on the planet, from SpaceX to the FAANG titans, you realise they don’t just build better products—they build better ways of working. They operate on a different wavelength, driven by a set of core principles that ruthlessly eliminate waste and complexity.
SpaceX, famous for achieving what was once considered impossible, follows a deceptively simple five-step engineering process. It’s a masterclass in first-principles thinking that they apply to building reusable rockets.
But what if we took that same powerful playbook and applied it to the complex, often chaotic world of enterprise IT Operations?
What you discover is that you can stop managing complexity and start engineering success. You can move from a state of constant firefighting to one of control, clarity, and velocity.
At dotslash, we’ve found this framework perfectly articulates how we help our clients transform their operations.
1. Make Requirements Smarter
The SpaceX process begins with a simple mandate: question every requirement. Assume the person who gave it to you is wrong. It sounds blunt, but its purpose is to fight the inertia of “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
In IT Operations, this is the most crucial—and most often skipped—step.
We receive vague requirements like “we need to monitor this database” or “we need an alert when the server CPU hits 90%.” The traditional approach is to simply obey the order. This is how you end up with 98 monitoring tools and still no idea what’s actually broken.
Our first job is to challenge the premise. We make the requirements smarter by asking better questions:
- Why do we need to monitor this database?
- What critical business service does it support?
Instead of a low-value CPU alert, the smarter requirement becomes:
We need to know when the customer checkout journey is at risk of degrading, and we need to know why.
This is the foundational shift from monitoring components to monitoring business outcomes.
2. Delete the Part or Process Step
The second rule is aggressive simplification: delete the part or the process. The bias is always towards removal. If you aren’t occasionally forced to add a part back in, you aren’t deleting enough.
This is our Tool Rationalisation and process simplification phase. It’s where we look at the sprawling, tangled web of systems and ask:
- What can we get rid of?
- Which tools are redundant?
- Which ones create more noise than value?
- What manual triage steps, pointless review meetings, and convoluted escalation paths can be eliminated entirely?
You cannot optimise a complex mess. You must first simplify it. By deleting unnecessary tools and process steps, we dramatically reduce cost, complexity, and the cognitive load on your teams—before we even think about optimisation.
3. Optimise
Only once you have questioned the requirements and deleted everything you can, do you move to optimisation.
For SpaceX, this is about making the remaining parts better, lighter, and more efficient.
For us, this is about optimising the signal. We now have a smaller, more manageable set of essential data streams. This is where we bring in the power of modern platforms like Dynatrace for deep observability and BigPanda for AIOps-driven event correlation.
We take the remaining alert noise and intelligently fuse it into a small number of high-context, actionable incidents.
We also optimise the workflow. By building seamless integrations into your ITSM platform—whether it’s ServiceNow or HaloITSM—we ensure that the optimised signal lands with the right team, first time, with all the information they need to act.
4. Accelerate
At SpaceX, acceleration is about cycle time—building and iterating faster than anyone else.
In IT Operations, the outcome is the same. After making requirements smarter, simplifying the landscape, and optimising the signal, you inevitably accelerate the entire business.
- You accelerate Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) because incidents are diagnosed and fixed in minutes, not hours or days.
- You accelerate the pace of innovation because your most valuable engineers are freed from mind-numbing, repetitive triage work to focus on building value.
- You accelerate your ability to adapt to market changes because your operations are no longer a bottleneck, but a strategic enabler.
5. Automate
Automation is the final step in the playbook—and for good reason. You only automate a process once you have questioned, simplified, and optimised it.
Automating a bad process just makes the bad thing happen faster.
This is our end goal: the journey towards Autonomous Operations.
With a clean, optimised, and accelerated system, you can finally trust it enough to take action on its own.
This is where you can:
- Implement automated remediation for common failures.
- Enable proactive self-healing.
- Truly step into the future of AIOps.
It’s the ultimate expression of operational excellence—but it’s only made possible by doing the hard work of the first four steps correctly.
Building rockets and running IT Operations are different disciplines, but the underlying logic for success is the same.
It requires a ruthless focus on simplicity and a commitment to engineering a better process—not just managing the existing one.
If you’re ready to apply this playbook to your own operations, let’s talk. We can help you move at lightspeed.