Meeting Goals in a DevOps / SRE World

Try as we might to make the idealistic goals of where we would like the state of our systems to be a reality, there are operational duties which keep us from always being able to achieve those goals. The following is a discussion on what it takes for goal setting and planning to meet those goals when you do have a constant stream of interrupts to ensure the proper operations of a company.

From the amount of interrupt work / chaos you have had in the past, look to forecast out the amount of goal oriented work you can do in the future as well as a goal to reduce interrupt work.

Interrupt Sources and Solutions

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Answer some of these questions to discover the impact of interrupts on your day:

• How many interrupts do you usually get a day? Sometimes just putting a number around the count of people interrupting you might surprise you and make you understand more where the time is going. Context switching on average takes 15 minutes, if you count the number of times you were interrupted and divide by 4 how many hours per day is that?

• Who are the ones usually interrupting your day? Are there specific people I your organization who feel more privileged to request ad-hoc tasks from you? Maybe its time to let them know this is not ok and to please follow process like everyone else when requesting assistance from you / the team.

• Can you guesstimate the amount of time interrupts take per week? Not counting the actual interrupts, what are the average hours you have spent per week on actually doing the work which is considered to be interrupts?

• What are common themes of the interrupt work you are getting? Can you sense a trend in what it is people are asking for? If so is there something you can automate or more information you can surface to people so they no longer have to ask for these things repeatedly?

• Is there an established process for the things you are being interrupted about? Perhaps its time to put some documentation or request types / software around the things people are asking of you. With this in place these requests will go into a queue you can prioritize.

Answers to these questions may be surprising. Is the number higher or lower than expected for the amount of time you spend on these tasks? Imagine if you were able to cut these numbers by 25% or even half. How would that impact your productivity?

Deflection Options

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We are trying here to not let anything distract from your goals. Here are some responses you might try when these interrupts come up to see what you can do to minimize impact.

• Crisis. When a true emergency / incident comes up, there is not much you can do to get out of working on this. The most important part is once the crisis is over, do a retrospective and figure out what and why this was caused so you can work to prevent things like this from coming up in the future as distractions. Incident reduction task is a valid item to add to your backlog and depending on the frequency should be bumped up to avoid having to deal with the same interrupt in the future.

• Immediate needs. The question when new interrupt work comes up which may be most effective is to ask yourself: "is what just came up from a chat, email, or someone walking up to you more important than what you were already working on?" The answer is likely no unless it is a true crisis. Explain to the person requesting the immediate need what it is you are working on and why it must get done if they persist.

• Is there a ticket for that? Probably one of my favorite questions as sometimes the answer is no. Once you have the ticket in your backlog if you show the requester where they are in line, that reassures them you have a plan to get to their task and roughly when. When people see there is a process to get your assistance they can follow that and stop distracting you.

• Get involved with parallel team planning. One of the best ways to stay proactive and get ahead of the curve with requests coming down the line is to make sure you are involved in the planning sessions of teams you work next to all day. Usually this would be development and IT teams. What projects are they working on which will need your coordination? Add that into your goals for the week to make sure its accounted for.

Walking through these exercises should help to guide you into a more focused and productive day. Make the change that allows you to accomplish those goals regularly.