Reliability Team Formation - Observability
I've written this team formation template to help Reliability Teams transitioning from temporary squads in #158 (closed) to plan, act with intent and be transparent about their new team implementations. It's certainly not exhaustive but it represents a good start to a complex change. Teams are encouraged to customise this template to their own needs and use this track their implementation steps. Please do include links to the artefacts/issues relating to each step for ease of tracking and transparency.
This is meant as a starting point, not a prescriptive guideline.
Lots of the content comes from building high performing teams as well as experiences from the teams director and managers.
First 2 Weeks (Wednesday Feb 1 to Wednesday Feb 14)
Answer the question: Who Are We?
@dawsmith - we started an initial team vision / discussion doc - wed decided to use a Google doc to have more dynamic / multi-edit and to transition outcomes from there to issues/epics/handbook updates.
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Review the team mission. Does it make sense to everyone? Does anything need to immediately change? -
Team building, for example: Have team members share strengths, weaknesses, communications styles and preferences, pet peeves, etc. with each other -
Have team members set up coffee chats with each other if they've not worked closely together before -
Manager: Setup/continue regular 1:1s with each team member
Answer the question: What are we doing?
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Review the teams OKRs. Do they make sense? Do they support the mission of the team? Which must be completed in FY24Q1? Is there enough capacity to achieve them? Act early on any required changes. -
Project planning for the Q - who will do what by when?
Answer the question: How will we do this?
@dawsmith - We are discussing how we work in a gdoc to start
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Decide on team values as a team (both in alignment and separate from GitLab values) (this is not a manager only exercise) -
Establish basic team processes: -
Establish cadence of sync meetings, cadence of retros -
How will we triage and prioritise new work? -
How will we ensure we meet Corrective Action and Security Fixes SLA's? -
How will we keep status up to date on epics, OKRs, etc? -
How will we share our status with leadership? -
Identify the key stakeholders of our services and how to communicate with them
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Nuts and Bolts
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Setup a team slack channel to have team discussions async. -
Review the team handbook page. What's immediately missing?
First Month (Thursday Feb 15 to Tuesday Feb 28)
@dawsmith: Team values and vision being discussed on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/17822 - there will be updates to our team page as those solidify.
Establish ownership of our services
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Update our team handbook page to include all services that our team owns -
Update Tech Stack for provisioning our services. gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!122117 (merged) -
Update Service Inventory to include our services. -
Identify quick cost saving opportunities for our services -
Gain a basic understanding of all the services that our team owns. What are they used for? Who uses them? What maintenance is required on a regular schedule? How critical are they? What does their tech debt look like? Are there any immediate actions that need to be taken? Are they using out of date software? -
Gather feedback on our services from key stakeholders -
What accepted risks/outstanding assurance issues do our services have? Do we have the right plans in place to address them? -
Re-Introduce the team on #Engineering-FYI
so everyone knows more about the new team and our mission -
What are the Performance Indicators that demonstrate we're successfully achieving our mission? How do these map to the broader Department/Division/Company (Key) Performance Indicators?
Second Month
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Hold a retrospective on the first month -
Review your mission again. What's changed? What needs to change based on your first month experiences? -
Review your OKRs again. Are they still achievable? Do they still support your mission? -
Write your first iteration of your vision to achieve your mission. -
Start longer term planning discussions. What should we aim for within this year? What changes are coming that might impact our team? -
What should our OKRs be for FY24Q2? -
How will we share your future plans with key stakeholders? -
How will we share your accomplishments with key stakeholders?
Third Month
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Hold a retrospective on the first 2 months -
Do the OKRs for FY24Q2 still make sense? -
Does the handbook represent our team accurately? -
Hold a retrospective on Q1