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Tag: remote teams

  • Best Practices for Remote IT Management

    Best Practices for Remote IT Management

    As companies adjust to the new normal of a completely remote workforce, IT teams still struggle to maintain productivity and workflows, meaning DevOps practices have never been more of an asset. IT teams must be more agile and efficient to manage their IT infrastructure from remote locations; otherwise, confusion and errors can ensue at a moment’s notice. 

    To ensure IT teams remain efficient and thrive in a collaborative, open culture, there are several steps that companies can take now to cultivate an innovative environment long after COVID-19 is over.

    Implementing “Game Day-Style” Practices

    In theory, “game day-style” practices are probably one of the best ways to ensure teams are ready for any remote work. This involves companies having IT teams work remotely as a test run, and then reporting problems early and often to avoid issues when everyone needs to be remote. Unfortunately, we’re well past this, which means that it’s now up to teams to communicate early and often. Breaking down siloed work environments, while creating open dialogue up and down the leadership chain, can go a long way. Naturally, connectivity is also a key factor here. With communication and connectivity at the core, companies can more easily assemble and designate teams for specific issues.

    This does, though, depend on the encouragement of company leadership, with senior decision-making being integral to the IT team’s success.

    Identifying a Trusted Team Leader

    An enterprise’s IT director or manager requires substantial expertise, true empathy and effective communication. Not with a command-and-control approach, but rather one that supports people by helping to facilitate communications and working to remove impediments without micromanaging.

    However, the most important condition for a director or manager is their own aptitude for working remotely as they must always maintain a high degree of diligence. Their communication and guidance reflect their leadership as well as strengthen the IT team’s capabilities.

    Directors or managers must ensure there is seamless coordination, strengthening cohesion between each team and reducing the number of dependencies. A DevOps approach is instrumental as it entails mechanisms such as version control, automated testing and deployment, ultimately creating autonomous, resourceful teams. Additionally, directors or managers can develop a methodology for pinpointing conflicts and enhancing synergy within IT teams. As a result, when working remotely, IT teams can operate at maximum efficiency and maintain high levels of productivity.

    The Components for Maximum Productivity

    With IT teams working in different locations, productivity and workflow are likely to be strained, especially with the current crisis. To counter this, IT teams have adopted collaboration tools to interact with one another, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom. These three platforms have seen a massive uptick in users:

    • Microsoft Teams has a total of 44 million daily active users.
    • Slack added 9,000 new paid customers, having over 12 million daily active users.
    • Zoom has a total of 300 million daily active users.

    While not any one platform is better than the other, it’s important to create the conditions for autonomous, empowered teams. This is where making the most of tools, such as version control, automated testing and other aspects of a good DevOps approach to software development and deployment, come into play. You not only have to manage the teams and their deliverables, but you have to ensure that you have a methodology that quickly identifies when they’re creating conflicts for one another. IT teams should select which is easiest to use and best satisfies their needs. Effective communication is the objective as using multiple messaging channels can cause confusion or reduce any likelihood of productivity.

    Communication Is Key

    Clear and consistent communication is the key to an IT team’s success as members must know what’s happening at all times, including the project’s current status and necessary components, assigned roles and responsibilities, and the overall goals and expectations of the project.

    The enemy of communication is assumption, which can harm an entire group’s synergy and productivity. For example, you assume that the software will simply work as intended, or you assume delivery will happen on time regardless of the project’s timeline.

    Assumption guarantees a project’s failure, which is why it is important to outline everything about the project, both the tangible and intangible.

    Never Forget About the People

    Companies, large and small, need to foster an environment exuding collaboration, communication and good will, which causes IT teams to flourish and grow. Given the current crisis, some companies are taking several measures to ensure that morale remains consistently high among all employees. This means investing time and effort into team-building or team-bonding activities such as virtual coffee breaks, lunches via Skype or Zoom, or even games.

    There is much fear surrounding COVID-19 and companies must prioritize each employee’s well-being, including routine check-ins, team or staff meetings and 1:1 time with managers to ensure that the health and safety of employees is kept at the forefront of decision making.  Creating an inclusive atmosphere also helps remind IT teams that they can depend on one another and are part of a larger community, regardless of the distance.

    The Common Denominator

    Most importantly, for all of the above to work, teams must rely on one underlying element: communication. It is virtually impossible for remote IT management to thrive without clear communication between individuals and their teams. Furthermore, there is the possibility that IT teams will adopt this remote lifestyle permanently once COVID-19 subsides. If so, companies must implement these best practices to ensure their growth and longevity as they will encounter more complex, demanding assignments from others.

  • Incident Resolution for Remote Teams

    Incident Resolution for Remote Teams

    People working in IT support and incident management right now are faced with unusual difficulties supporting large remote workforces and managing unpredictable workloads. On Reddit, system admins and other IT pros are bemoaning the hiccups and hassles of working in isolation while trying to resolve issues and maintain high SLAs. You can’t go grab your indispensable SME for troubleshooting, because that person is also home and inundated with messages and alerts from many different tools.

    Networks, VPNs and servers are being hammered extra hard right now from higher usage of SaaS apps and collaboration tools. User expectations are even more grandiose than normal: The home-based IT environment is a lifeline to whatever remains of human interaction. IT organizations are expected to make applications and services work flawlessly–overnight. Undoubtedly, IT pros are working with assiduity to keep the wheels of work moving for their employers during a time of crisis. Yet, working longer hours isn’t the answer. We need new ways of working—ones which may prove better than the current status quo for the long term.

    In many organizations, the process of incident management and resolution begins with people looking at screens full of metrics. You see a spike in something, such as network I/O, and immediately begin to investigate it, assuming the worst. A more adverse scenario is when users call out problems on Twitter, Reddit or other popular tech communities, creating a noxious PR situation which IT and the business must swiftly respond to and manage. This ad hoc, reactive fire drill takes time, and resolving that particular issue may not be the most important item of the day. In software development, it’s akin to the bad practice of designing the architecture of a system first and then the user experience.

    Given everything that’s at stake in the foreseeable future of stay-at-home mandates, SREs and IT support technicians need to flip the incident management process. Rather than beginning with the metrics and working backwards to uncover the problem, if there even is one, start by looking for the most important problems to solve. Then, discover the resources and components which support that end-user process and finally, analyze the metrics which are most relevant. For example:

    1. A B-to-C provider of a streaming video service is now seeing a 200% increase in daytime traffic. This is resulting in sluggish load times for users and glitches. 
    2. IT has tagged the components beneath that service, so IT operators know exactly which VMs, databases and load balancers come into play. 
    3. Next, the operations team can identify the most relevant metrics, for instance CPU idle time, to measure and take steps to correct. 

    The Problem-First Approach

    It sounds so simple: flip the process. Yet, this is not the case. IT operators and SREs are not accustomed to thinking in terms of which problems to solve or prevent. Being proactive or predictive hasn’t been the common workflow.

    Here is how IT operations and DevOps teams can take a proactive approach to managing the availability and health of enterprise services.

    Coordinate Across Departments

    Identifying the most critical problems to solve right now is the hardest step and the one which will take the longest. Common problems these days are related to cost and scale: How do I right-size my environment to reduce costs or handle more workloads? Broaden your field of inputs to narrow down to the specific issue, such as slow page loads on the financial reporting website. Product managers, account managers and business unit leads who are the closest to the customer experience can deliver feedback on the top issues affecting customer/user satisfaction. Teams should also review recent support tickets to identify common themes of pain.

    Fine-Tune Your Approach to Metrics

    The Utilization Saturation and Errors (USE) Method is one way to approach the problem-first incident management process. As detailed by Brendan Gregg, a senior performance architect at Netflix, this methodology begins by posing questions, seeking answers and working backwards to the metrics. For each resource that you want to measure, identify three metrics: one for utilization, one for saturation and one for errors.

    “The USE Method has made you aware of what you didn’t check: What were once unknown-unknowns are now known-unknowns,” Gregg explained.

    Standardize Workflows

    Create a common process for incident management across all your teams. Without the advantage of having almost everyone in the same room to huddle together in an ad hoc fashion when big issues crop up, it’s imperative to institute clear steps and roles. Doing so will prevent the frustrations, confusion and oversights that needlessly delay resolution. Since most incidents are composed of multiple contributing factors, teams need to adopt a small number of user-friendly tools to document and organize the information. At our company, we’re now using tools such as Miro, an online whiteboard application, to replace our physical whiteboarding sessions. Of course, there’s also Zoom, Slack, Jira and a host of other cloud-based tools already in place at many organizations. Mandate which tools everyone should use, with some guidelines on how to use them.

    Increase Automation

    In some organizations, scaling requirements in response to demand have increased tenfold. Automation is playing a critical role now; moving away from a web GUI, for example, is more scalable and aligns with modern tools such as Chef and Puppet. User tickets can be auto generated, for instance, from emails and linked to code management systems like GitHub. Modern development and operations teams are also expanding automation in unit testing and provisioning. 

    Watch for Burnout

    Whether there’s more work and/or a need to fill the hours during long quarantine days, many software engineers, testers and architects are working longer days right now. Yet, exhaustion and burnout can lead to errors and oversights along with low morale. It’s up to managers to make sure that employees are taking breaks, working reasonable days and having the time and energy to attend to personal needs.