Dealing with the Culture Chaos Monkey on Your Ops Team

Abstract:

It is hard to hire Operations people, almost impossible to get good ones, and possibly harder than finding a good developer. Often you have an Operations team that is siloed from the rest of the teams and hide their work. The culture is hard to change. While implementing some DevOps notions at the company I work for, I came across this exact situation: - The Developers were starting to collaborate more across teams. - The Operations were putting out fires constantly - causing more work for themselves - Devs and Operations were not collaborating - There was open hostility between the groups - Operations was hiding their work from each other as well - Incomplete solutions were being implemented (killing processes for months instead of solving the root causes)

So we had to roll up our sleeves and get everyone working together. Since the Operations team was stressed and overworked, we reduced their workload to the important tasks of finishing the server automation project. We asked developers to do the work they were asking Operations to preform themselves, while Operations gave them the tools, access and knowledge they needed to proceed. We also asked some developers to join the Operations team in helping to automate the server configs.

In the end, we saw more collaboration, less stress and projects started to flow again. People were collaborating across the teams and since there was now more eyes on the problems, they were getting solved at a faster pace and with more complete solutions.

Why/Who Cares: This talk will be interesting to those who find themselves embroiled in a Culture war at their jobs and will give ideas and hints on how to solve the problems in front of them. As well, it will show that even the worst environment can be improved through collaboration.

Speaker:

Speaker 27