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217 lines
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217 lines
8.0 KiB
ReStructuredText
Soft Skills
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***********
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What is the role of Operations?
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===============================
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Under any of the Operations professions, the most fundamental role
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of the Operations person is to deliver services to a set of customers.
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To build upon this the Operations person maintains existing IT
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infrastructures, translates customer requirements into tangible and
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actionable solutions, assists in the protection of customer information
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and services, and advises stakeholders on application of technology
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under existing limitations of time, money, or capabilities.
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Maintaining Existing IT Infrastructures
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---------------------------------------
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The most visible role of Operations is to maintain the status quo.
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For the system administrator this means maintaining servers and
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processes such as logging, monitoring, backups, authentication, or
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naming services. For the network administrator it means maintaining
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routers, switches, the edge network, gateways, or the relationship
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with the corporate Internet Service Provider (ISP). A security
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engineer might be responsible for maintaining a vulnerability
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scanning capability, incident response policy and processes, intrusion
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detection systems, firewalls, and a customer security awareness
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training program. These roles are distinct but there is sometimes
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overlap between them in smaller organizations where fewer people
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server in multiple roles.
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Translating Customer Requirements
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---------------------------------
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Operations roles are customer service positions. These careers
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require a level of customer interaction because the services delivered
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by the Operations professional must be driven by customer needs.
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In this case, customer is used to mean the business, organization,
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or other entity that is employing the Operations professional. Some
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questions to ask to help the Operations person understand requirements
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from the customer perspective:
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* What is the core mission of this organization?
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* How does Operations support the mission?
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* What does the organization need from the Operations professionals?
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* Why should this organization come to these Operations people for this service or solution? (What is the value proposition for Operations within this organization?)
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* How could Operations provide more value: higher level of competitiveness, faster service delivery, stronger security, or other benefit that aligns with the mission?
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Translating customer requirements is key to focusing the efforts
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of Operations. Operations work can be a slippery slope where the
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professionals are spreading themselves too thin on projects and
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deliverables that do not serve the organizations mission. One way
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to focus the efforts of Operations is to answer these questions and
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to ensure that the Operations organization, whether insourced or
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outsourced, is delivering services that provide the most value.
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Protection of Information and Services
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--------------------------------------
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Often the Operations professionals in an organization are the people
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who most completely understand the technical risk to organizational
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assets from an IT perspective. Senior management within an organization
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will usually understand risks related to financials, competition,
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manufacturing, etc. but they often do not understand IT enough to make
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an informed decision. Operations professionals are the ones with the
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deep-dive technical expertise required to comprehend risks, threats,
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vulnerabilities, and countermeasures then translate them into
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language senior management can understand.
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This is another area where the Operations professional is communicating
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with the organization's leaders to advise on appropriate actions
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to address IT security where it makes sense for the organization.
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Areas where organizations need the Operations professional
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to advice on IT security could include threats to data from internal
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and external sources, hardware failure, site availability or
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resilience, data preservation, and information integrity. Again,
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these areas are dependent on the organization's mission.
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For example: an ecommerce organization will most likely want strong
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site availability and protection of customer personal information.
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The Operations professionals might build a site with high resilience
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and availability including use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs),
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strong encryption not only for the ecommerce session but also data
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at rest, role-based access for internal employees accessing customer
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information to reduce access to only those people who need access
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to that information. Organizational leaders often do not understand
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how these solutions are implemented so it is up to the Operations
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professional to communicate the threat, solution, cost, impact to
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the organization of implementing the solution.
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Advising within Current Limitations
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-----------------------------------
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The Operations professional who advises an organization must also
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consider limitations that impact the potential solution. Cost,
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timing, expertise within the organization, available time of the
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people who would implement the solution, or IT security issues may
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be considerations. For example, decision makers within the
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organization will need to know what is possible and for what cost
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so they can make the decision how to spend the organization's money.
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Good, fast, or cheap (pick two): it may be the Operations professional's
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responsibility to explain this concept from an IT perspective.
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* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle
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Business Savvy
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==============
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Supporting business needs.
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--------------------------
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We exist professionally to support the needs of the organization.
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Developing the Trusted Advisor Relationship
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-------------------------------------------
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Be enablers and problem solvers, not a hinderance. The antithesis of the BOFH.
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Developing and Leveraging Core Competencies
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-------------------------------------------
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Selling system changes and new proposals
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----------------------------------------
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Negotiating budgetary constraints vs. need/want requirements
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------------------------------------------------------------
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Communicating with internal and external customers
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--------------------------------------------------
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* Managing maintenance windows
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Evaluating a product offering
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-----------------------------
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The importance of Documentation
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===============================
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What to document
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----------------
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* Runbooks? SOP? (cparedes: might be worthwhile even though we want to automate
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SOP's away as much as possible - what should we check at 2 AM? What do folks
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typically do in this situation if automation fails?)
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* Architecture and design (cparedes: also maybe talk about *why* we choose that
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design - what problems did we try to solve? Why is this a good solution?) How
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to manage documentation
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Documentation through Diagrams
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------------------------------
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Project Management (Does time management go here too?)
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======================================================
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The project management triangle (good, cheap, fast: pick two)
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* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle
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Agile
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=====
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Kanban
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------
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Scrum
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-----
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Working with other teams
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========================
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Where do you go from here?
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==========================
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How to get help, keep sharp, learn new skills, and network within the systems
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community.
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Mailing lists
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-------------
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Local user groups
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-----------------
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LOPSA
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-----
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Twitter
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-------
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ServerFault
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-----------
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Sign up and participate. As your own questions, but also answer questions that
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look interesting to you. This will not only help the community, but can keep you
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sharp, even on technologies you don't work with on a daily basis.
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Books (and concepts worth "Googling")
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-------------------------------------
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* Web Operations, John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins
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* The Art of Capacity Planning, John Allspaw
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* Blueprints for High Availability, Evan Marcus and Hal Stern
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* Resilience Engineering, Erik Hollnagel
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* Human Error, James Reason
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* To Engineer is Human, Henry Petroski
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* To Forgive Design, Henry Petroski
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The Tao of DevOps
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=================
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What is DevOps
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--------------
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What isn't DevOps
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-----------------
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Why devops is important
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-----------------------
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