- 2.1 Misalignment
- 2.2 Collective Ownership
- 2.3 Ownership Using SRE
- 2.4 The Challenge Statement
- 2.5 Coaching
- 2.6 Summary
2.4 The Challenge Statement
With an in-depth understanding of what to strive for during SRE transformation, the challenge statement can be concisely presented. Following is what the challenge is about.
SRE is an operations methodology that aligns the product delivery organization on operational concerns. The key challenge in traditional software delivery organizations is the misalignment on production operations. In such organizations, the following is true.
Developers do not know why they should be doing operations.
Operations engineers do not know why developers are not interested in operations.
Product managers think operations work is done by operations engineers.
Management does not promote and fund the topic.
In such a software delivery organization, there are no solid foundations on top of which SRE can be built as a practice. The foundations need to be put in place first. This will be a major part of the SRE transformation. The transformation will need to shift stakeholders’ mindsets in the following ways.
Developers should want to be involved in on-call processes to gain enough current operational knowledge to develop features that work well in production.
Operations engineers should want to enable developers to perform service operations by providing the SRE infrastructure as a framework in order to distribute the operational work throughout the product delivery organization in an optimal way.
Product managers should want to be involved in operations to help reduce customer escalations by making decisions based on production data. The decisions are about the prioritization of user journeys for which the incidents need to be detected, agreements on incident backlog handling, and prioritization of reliability features.
Executives should want to enable effective and efficient product operations by promoting SRE and providing appropriate funding in a timely fashion.
Each party in the software delivery organization benefits from SRE. The benefits make it worth undergoing the SRE transformation. The benefits can be used as a beacon to aspire for, unleashing fun on the SRE transformation journey. This book will take you on the journey of transforming a software delivery organization bit by bit into one that does operations the SRE way and enjoys doing so. To get started, in the next section let us look at the general way the SRE transformation can be executed.