Slack groups per SGG and region

GitLab Support: Process Change Rollout Plan

Slack groups per SGG and region

The Story

It can be useful to get the attention of your SGG, or more specifically of all colleagues in a specific region within your SGG. Typing out names one by one however is not efficient and prone to mistakes. Slack groups are the perfect tool for the job, and after experimenting with specific Slack group handles in Ginkgo for a few weeks, we were convinced that every SGG should have them. The Slack groups have now been created and pre-filled with the current state of SGG membership. Process changes have been put in place to make sure that new arrivals and SGG changes for existing team members will be reflected in those groups.

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• Original RFC: SGG: Per-region Slack handles to easily ping a ... (#4297 - closed)
• RFC for global rollout: SGG: Roll out per-region Slack handles for all ... (#4550 - closed)

The Roles

Role	Description
Champions	Me, the Ginkgo group, Rebecca and Tine/Mike
Users	All Support Engineers working in an SGG (mainly, although managers might just as well make use of the handles)
Impacted Non-Users	People outside Support are unlikely to ever use these handles

Schedule

• Rollout to begin on 2022-09-08
• Adoption complete by 2022-09-15

Training

Specific training for usage of Slack group handles should not be necessary. How each SGG makes best use of them is up to the individual SGGs. I've made sure to let every SGG know about the addition as soon as it was in place (and demonstrating the use at the same time), see here for example:

Success Determination

Success can be observed by usage of the handles in the day to day communication inside each SGG's channel. As the process changes for keeping the groups updated after this initial effort do not add any new steps but only slightly modify existing steps (new members already need to be added to some Slack groups) a minimum level of adoption should not be needed to justify the effort. I'll make sure to work with the SGG DRIs so they'll ask all SGGs about adoption/usage in the regular sync meetings, but I'm confident that all groups will quickly learn to love the new ease in communication.

Action Plan

1. Announce the change and include The Story in the SWIR on 2022-09-10
2. Post a message in the #support_team-chat slack channel (or other support channel as appropriate) announcing the change and pointing to the SWIR announcment on date each individual SGGs Slack channel
3. Announce the change and tell The Story in Team meetings by 2022-09-15
   • EMEA team meeting
   • AMER team meeting (Does not exist anymore?)
   • APAC team meeting
4. Other communications channels
   • Discuss in 1-1s, telling The Story, by 2022-09-29
   • Other communications channels, if required - for example, post to a TAM channel if the TAMs will be impacted non-users
5. Report back on change adoption, concerns, etc. by 2022-10-15

Follow-Up Plan

As mentioned above: Gather feedback in the next SGG sync meetings (end of September, so after about three weeks of possible usage). I'll also make sure to monitor all current and near-future new arrivals to see if the process changes work correctly and they get added to the Slack groups as expected. Rollback would be possible via an Access Request that removes the groups.