14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Did your cloud operations team put out 50 service tickets during the last sprint – turning around tickets in hours and days rather than weeks or months? In traditional IT, closing more service tickets is a cause for celebration. However, if you're moving to the cloud, it's cause for concern. Let’s take a closer look at why this old-world measure for success is no longer applicable and maybe driving bad behaviour as you implement your cloud strategy.
Ticketing efficiency through project management
Service tickets are the bane of operations teams. Resetting a password, adding a new user, provisioning a virtual machine – the tasks are endless. If these tickets aren’t closed in a timely fashion, then users complain. Some operations teams have found ways to improve ticket management efficiency, such as writing scripts to automate parts of the process or batching similar jobs to complete them all at once.
At the same time, companies are introducing project management techniques from newer frameworks like Agile. This means teams are working within sprints, tasks are pushed to the done column by sprint-end, and scrum masters can carefully watch burndown rates and completed story points.
These new techniques align with the service ticketing approach since tickets are just tasks, which can be measured as they move from the backlog to ‘in progress' and finally land in the done column as closed tickets. Managers can set KPIs around the number of tickets closed per sprint, making it easy to measure results and hold individuals accountable. Thus, operational staff have an incentive to find ways to automate tasks so they can meet and beat their KPIs.
Automating the waiting game
While the operations team want to improve their ticket-closing capacity, there’s a problem with the ticketing system – a classic example of the Company Queue, which is a serious issue we discussed in Sign #7: Your IT-project pipeline is progressing slowly. Company Queues form when teams must engage an expert to get something done. Since companies have so few experts, teams must wait their turn, resulting in delays and increased costs.
In that article, we argued companies should introduce a cloud user journey so that users engage an automated service via a GUI, CLI, or API rather than an expert. With a cloud user journey, all teams can reset a password, add a new user, or provision their own virtual server in parallel with other teams, thereby eliminating wait times.
However, if the KPIs for the cloud operations team is set around the number of tickets closed, what incentive does the team have to introduce a cloud user journey? Further, if the team’s manager is effectively a Gate Keeper, then it will be doubly difficult to make the mental shift required. In short, measuring service-ticket velocity is a good example of a metric from the old IT world that helps drive bad behaviour in the cloud space.
Implementing and maintaining a Cloud Operating Model
In this series, we have looked at the different elements of a successful Cloud Operating Model.
This includes:
Dividing your organisation into service providers and users mediated by a Cloud Shared Responsibility Model
Introducing a product development model along with product management talent
Introducing a cloud business model to fund feature development
Introducing DevOps with the correct incentives
Codifying approvals in a sophisticated CI/CD pipeline.
To successfully implement your new Cloud Operating model, new cloud metrics are required in measuring success (or otherwise) and helping to drive good behaviour.
For example, in the case of the cloud user journey, you’re likely to focus on user experience metrics such as time on task, error rate, as well as adoption and retention rates. For feature development, you will look at utilisation, feature requests, and bug reports. For DevOps, you will need to consider DORA metrics to measure team performance.
If your cloud teams are still using metrics from the old IT world, then chances are you’re not realising the full value of your cloud investment.
At DigiRen, we have years of experience building cloud solutions. We specialise in building Cloud Operating Models that enable businesses to take advantage of their cloud investment. Codifying and automating approval hoops within a sophisticated CI/CD pipeline will significantly reduce disruption and operational, financial & security risks. To learn more, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn.