One front door
New work enters through a single intake and two light decision gates — Gate 1 (is this worth doing?) and Gate 2 (is it ready to build?). Effort is earned at a gate; nothing is built on a whim.
Service management a small team can actually keep up.
Just enough process to take on the right work and ship it so it lasts — one front door for new work, and a “done” that means operable, not merely running.
Current standard: v0.2.0 · released 2026-06-24.
Small teams can’t run ITIL — it assumes a department and a budget for process nobody has. But they still have to decide what’s worth building, design it so it can actually be run, and avoid the 2 a.m. page for something nobody wrote down. FitSD is the smallest amount of that discipline a handful of people can keep up.
Two things do most of the work
Section titled “Two things do most of the work”Readiness is the finish line
Nothing reaches live service until it is evidenced as ready — documented, recoverable (with a tested restore), secure, monitored and supportable. “Done” means operable, not just switched on.
Who’s it for?
Section titled “Who’s it for?”FitSD pays off differently depending on where you sit — pick your side.
Governance & leadership
Fund the right work — and prove it’s run well — without a PMO.
- Decisions on a page, not in a corridor. Proposals arrive in your language — driver, cost of doing nothing, options, effort — with a clear yes/no.
- An audit trail without an audit team. Acceptance records, a risk register and change records — the evidence customers and regulators ask for, produced as you work.
- Risk controlled at the front door. Nothing’s built on a whim; new tools and suppliers arrive through due diligence.
- A real on-ramp to ISO 27001 & NIS2. Lightweight now; the discipline maps onto the heavy standards when you need them.
- “Done” means operable. Fewer 2 a.m. incidents and unsupportable services — lower operational risk and run-cost.
Engineers & implementers
Get heard, ship it once, and never carry it alone.
- Get your idea funded. The Idea Brief and Gate 1 frame your case in leadership’s language — good ideas stop dying for want of a pitch.
- Just enough process. Two light gates and a done-check — not ITIL. The smallest discipline a handful of people can keep up.
- Keep your own stack and workflow. FitSD says what good looks like; you keep the how — it hands the build back to the way you already ship.
- Design operability in, up front. Gate 2 makes you say how you’ll back it up, monitor and support it — you find the gap now, not in six months.
- “Done” means you’re not on the hook at 2 a.m. Documented, recoverable (tested restore), monitored and supportable before go-live.
How it stays light
Section titled “How it stays light”FitSD owns only a thin set of testable requirements. It ships a full, ready-to-use process for one capability — Solution Development, the front door — and for the other four it states the requirement and points at the standard or process a team already runs. That single choice is how it can require change, incident and security discipline without rebuilding those disciplines.
QuickstartOne project, five moves — a win this week, not a rollout plan.
The CharterWhat FitSD is: principles, the capability model, roles, conformance.
RequirementsThe testable “shall” statements — the spine an auditor would check.
Adoption & PositioningWho it's for, why they adopt it, and how it fits by team size.
It’s a personal project, deliberately not tied to any one organisation, and released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) so any team can adopt and adapt it.