Generating Organic Accountability of Operational Issues

If you are wondering how to get SMEs (subject matter experts) to naturally want to be a part of and help out with production issues, you need to establish a culture of organic accountability. Production issues can feel like a distraction from the work people want to be doing. There is inherently a sense of annoyance when production level issues arise as people feel like they have to now pay attention not only to their workload but use that time to do other work they had not planned. Try implementing these concepts to improve this mindset in your organization.

Accountability stems from the person who is best suited to solve the issue understanding the customer impact and having the toolset to enable quick resolution.

Error Budgets

From a management level perspective set the tone that it is ok to take time to fix production level issues. Employees need to know that doing this work will not mean extra work for them later. Make an error budget for the teams frequently pulled into issues based on the amount of time they have used in the past during the week. Use that during planning to set realistic expectations of what can be done in the week given normal interrupts from production issues. Remind the team during planning what their time budget is. Using this method people will inherently be more willing to assist with these issues knowing their time is allotted and there will not be the cost of extra work if they are pulled in.

Choose the Right Person

Try implementing these options to ensure you are picking the right person to assist with the production problem:

• Subject mater expert (SME): you want the person who can solve the issue the fastest and will not have to follow up with others / do further research. If you are going to choose someone more junior, ensure they know their escalation paths if they get stuck.

• Rotating expert: if you continually ask the same person about how to solve operational issues they will eventually burn out and no longer be willing to help out. Rotate the on call person per week or whichever timeframe you choose.

• Ability to defer: the person on the list should not always feel like they need to be the one answering, they should have a list of others they can contact provided to them. This way they can ensure there is someone else to take the task if they are not immediately able to look.

Competition and Pride

Anther mechanism to build pride and willingness to participate amongst service owners is to publish stats of resolution times per service. Make it a competition for people to show off how fast they are able to resolve issues. This should eventually turn into a source of pride knowing how fast they can solve an issue compared to other teams.

Follow-up

The last and perhaps largest factor which should motivate people to want to help with production issues is if you can work with them to ensure the problem will not repeat. There is no larger de-motivator than having to repeatedly fix the same problem. Learn from the issues that come up and ensure they are prioritized as a larger scale fix. Document what fixes came up in a runbook, see if you can automate them to avoid having to deal with this in the future until the permanent fix is in place.