ChatOps

Chapter 4. Roles and Responsibilities of DevOps (or Ops) Engineers

Until recent years, the roles and responsibilities of IT teams were made very specific and clear. However, through Agile software development and DevOps, cross-functional teams are beginning to demonstrate the effectiveness of tearing down the traditional divisions of labor. By making collaboration a priority, team members are beginning to understand more than just their own unique roles within their teams and organizations. Empathy between teammates and even different teams begins to take hold, and a sense of ownership and accountability becomes central to all actions. That empathy then bleeds over into the designing of services (both software and infrastructure), and the end users’ needs are given the utmost consideration for all business decisions.

Build Empathy

Should your organization make the unfortunate decision that teams should remain isolated and task-specific, ChatOps still helps to create greater empathy within the teams.

The visibility of work as it takes place helps to create a shared context and understanding both within and across individual teams. It’s easier to accept that your own request cannot be completed immediately when you have visibility into the work of others.

Goal Alignment

In previous software development and IT efforts, goals often varied from one department to the next. Software developers were incentivized and rewarded for meeting metrics typically tied to quantity of code “shipped.” IT Operations teams were incentivized for preventing outages, and their primary efforts centered around providing maximum uptime of service to both internal and external stakeholders or customers. Likewise, Security, Network, Database, Support, and every other breakout team within Information Technology all had their own concerns, goals, and efforts associated with accomplishing their objectives. The problem was that rarely did these goals align in a way that placed the needs of the end user and business as the top priority.

Now, organizations are beginning to see the measurable gains made possible by creating highly efficient, cross-functional teams where more of the team members are enabled. For example, rather than just the IT Operations subgroup assuming the responsibility of being “on call” for service disruptions, more members of the team (including developers and even management) are taking on this responsibility. After all, they have intimate knowledge of and expertise on subject matter that could be directly related to problems. More of the team can also be part of the planning, design, building, and maintenance of software and the infrastructure on which it resides.

Spreading Institutional Knowledge

A key component of these cross-functional teams is their ability to collaborate effectively. By moving many of their conversations, as well as records of actions and context, into a persistent group chat tool, friction that previously caused delays in the development, maintenance, and support of software and infrastructure is removed. Institutional knowledge and awareness of many aspects within IT and beyond are given the opportunity to persist and grow over time. Live documentation on exactly how things are accomplished is generated as it’s happening.

Live Documentation

Utilizing ChatOps is a great way of onboarding new team members. Documentation on “how jobs get done” is available in real time for all to see. By viewing the conversations, actions, and more from within a group chat tool, individuals can quickly learn how to accomplish a great deal of work.

Documentation is and has always been an incredibly important part of every role within IT. Keeping documentation up-to-date means that teams always have the most accurate information available to them. ChatOps provides a natural method of automatically and persistently maintaining up-to-date documentation. At any time, personnel can review conversations and actions from within group chat to consume the most recent information with regard to current status and procedures to accomplish a growing number of tasks.

Learning Organization

The role of IT Ops engineers is often consumed with efforts toward prediction and prevention of service disruptions. ChatOps enables a focus on sharing information, learning, improving, and innovating to make services more resilient and reliable. The same focus on learning should apply to all roles within IT.

Spreading the load and knowledge across larger groups and teams affords deeper understanding and learning. This in turn provides opportunities to experiment and innovate on the processes and tools of both software engineers and those who were previously labeled as IT engineers or system administrators. Much of this comes directly as a result of treating persistent group chat as the common interface for nearly everything that takes place within the team.

In the following chapter, I’ll begin to outline some of the ways teams are leveraging ChatOps in their own organizations to increase awareness, simplify tasks, increase velocity, and more.