97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 63. Effecting SRE Cultural Changes in Enterprises

Vanessa Yiu

 

Most well-established organizations have an ingrained set of practices, tools, and processes. Bringing on SRE means overcoming inertia and requiring a substantial investment of time to educate as well as continuous reinforcement of practices and behaviors.

Change is hard, especially in large organizations. Trying to change too much too quickly can result in confusion and lead to skepticism. We are creatures of habit—a sudden change of routines and operating outside of our comfort zone typically attracts initial doubt. Most cultural changes are also iterative and unlikely to be perfect from the get-go, so if people come across a bad experience or if something did not work out as intended the first time around, a negative perception can quickly propagate across the organization.

To avoid this, focus initially on the few most critical behaviors to adapt. In other words, find the key blockers to successful implementation of SRE at your workplace. If a shared responsibility model does not exist between developers and SRE, for instance, then perhaps start here, because that is foundational to getting SRE right.

After identifying your focus area, decide how best actually to facilitate the change in behavior. It is no good to want all services to have SLOs when the company has no such tooling, or to mandate blameless ...