Keeping pace with agile production teams
In the early 2000s, within a period of heavy business development at WEB.DE, the team was swamped. Pretty much everybody has been working up to their limits, and I really do owe to everybody who has been able to keep up his motivation and stick with the team. The job markets for UNIX professionals were swept bare, and even considering buying into small system providers wouldn’t want to work out reasonably.
At the peak of our workload, product management was desperate with our IT performance. And I can understand every single bit of their anger. We were hardly able to keep their bleeding edge software up and running on our live systems, let alone build up our own know how and find the time to provide them with the experimental software, testing environments or statistical analyses they were in desperate need of. They were developing the feeling that they were dependent on the disposal of daily goodwill of IT personel to be able to do their own job. Deeply frustrating.
On top of that, during “high noon”, our eldest administrator, due to personal reasons, could no longer dedicate himself to the round-the-clock schedules we were devoting to our vision. The team was desperate, demotivated, and at a loss. What was born out of despair should however soon prove to be a substantial alleviation, which we were able to cultivate on our way going. Even if our ego wouldn’t always make it easy for us.
In the time coming, we were discovering, that the problem between IT was of systematic nature, and not a workload problem at all. And the transfer of a fully qualified IT expert into the production team was the solution we all had called for, but had not been able to see it through the thicket of daily operations.
As a highly skilled person, this IT professional could care for the needs of the production team, without being eaten up by day to day IT operations. And being grown up within IT service management, he was well aware of the prerequisites of technical online maintenance. So he was willing to “stick to the rules”, had good acquaintance with most the people, which created an atmosphere of mutual trust which enabled us to give him all the freedom he needed to provide the production team with what they desperately called for.
Even if some IT staff always had a feeling of inferiority — understandable, they had to stick to a strict service business where he was allowed to play with many tools — it was the alleviation we desperately needed to keep on organising high quality service management. Extending administrators or teams which were devoted to production teams proved the right way to go in turbulent environments.
Again, creating an environment of mutual responsibility was key to cope with our workload. And although, at least to a certain amount, we owe our play instinct to good service, we got rewarded, as some of those gadgets came back to go live. And for some strange kind of reason, we weren’t really completely unfamiliar with those systems …
