Ryan Frantz
Operational Relevance
Relevance is important. Operational relevance is critical to being successful at your job and creating a DevOps culture.

I've been working to emerge from my team's silo and tear down the walls of the development team's silo. I've also been working to improve my team's outward communication about the effects of system and service outages on the organization's productivity. My guys are used to talking about DNS servers, virtual clusters, and Internet bandwidth. None of those means anything to non-IT folk. Non-IT folk think we speak Greek and communication breaks down. As a result, we may not be in the loop on current and future projects (see slide 9 from 10+ Deploys Per Day; Ops Stereotype).

To help illustrate to my team what it means when we improve our communications about outages, I drew up this little XKCD-like sketch (via Skitch):



The point from the sketch is that we need to translate what and who are impacted by an outage, not just that an outage occurred.

My goal: Demonstrate operational relevance to the organization and increase the likelihood of being involved in all projects.
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