Dull, boring and predictable

I am pretty sure that with a title like that, I will get quite a few people's attention!

Over the past few days, I have been reflecting on what it takes to run highly available technology services.

Nobody likes the service being down. That sinking feeling when a service is off line and you don't know how long it will be before it's back online. Taking calls from customers and standing up in front of senior colleagues, all of whom need answers. The team is stressed, and it is easy to make a mistake and for things to get worse.

I have worked with a number of businesses where the lack of service stability has become a habit. It's become a regular agenda item at the board, and all the executives are on speed dial for the dreaded downtime calls.

At a Tech huddle I ran, I reminded one team that 12 months ago, we were that business—in a war room setting. Yet over 12 months later, we were no longer in that situation. We were running without unplanned outages, had removed major incidents, and had just completed 6 green months.

One of the team called out from 'War Room to Wow Room'. I love that description. It summarised the amazing achievements of the whole team across the business.

What was the journey? How had we achieved this? There are some lessons taken from a range of businesses that I have worked with (and of course, there are more)

• Leadership needs to be visible and take responsibility. Realising that understanding the risk is better than trying to get to no risk.
• Colleagues need a safe place to work where the guiderails are easy to understand. So, put service quality at the centre of the ways of working, mandating cyber and service alongside building new features.
• Just end monolithic releases and embrace increasing the cadence of releases.
• This is a team game and everyone is involved in delivering products with the highest level of quality.

For any team to get to dull, boring, predictable service is a reasonable aspiration. Maintaining that over green weeks and green months is when it becomes hard. A few things that I have done with differing businesses

• Complacency is the enemy. Seek to continuously challenge yourself and the team to find new ways to improve the velocity of delivery and unlock value faster while maintaining high availability.
• Be curious and always engage widely with customers, stakeholders and colleagues to understand expectations and provide leadership on exceeding them.
• Remember, this is a team activity. It is business-wide. We all win or fail together. There is no blame. Should the stability come to an end, get ready to start again.

Lets make our technology dull, boring and predictable.