Operations in a Distributed World - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 153

Tasks That Cannot Be Automated
Sometaskscannotbeautomatedbecausetheyarehumanprocesses:maintaining yourrela-
tionship with a stakeholder, managing the bidding process to make a large purchase, eval-
uating new technology, or negotiating within a team to assemble an oncall schedule. While
they cannot be eliminated through automation, they can be streamlined:
• Many interactions with stakeholders can be eliminated through better docu-
mentation. Stakeholders can be more self-sufficient if provided with introduct-
ory documentation, user documentation, best practices recommendations, a
style guide, and so on. If your service will be used by many other services or
service teams, it becomes more important to have good documentation. Video
instruction is also useful and does not require much effort if you simply make
a video recording of presentations you already give.
• Some interactions with stakeholders can be eliminated by making common re-
quests self-service. Rather than meeting individually with customers to under-
stand future capacity requirements, their forecasts can be collected via a web
user interface or an API. For example, if you provide a service to hundreds of
other teams, forecasting can be become a full-time job for a project manager;
alternatively, it can be very little work with proper automation that integrates
with the company's supply-chain management system.
• Evaluating new technology can be labor intensive, but if a common case is
identified, the end-to-end process can be turned into an assembly-line process
and optimized. For example, if hard drives are purchased by the thousand, it is
wise to add a new model to the mix only periodically and only after a thorough
evaluation. The evaluation process should be standardized and automated, and
results stored automatically for analysis.
• Automation can replace or accelerate team processes. Creating the oncall
schedule can evolve into a chaotic mess of negotiations between team mem-
bers battling to take time off during an important holiday. Automation turns
this into a self-service system that permits people to list their availability and
that churns out an optimal schedule for the next few months. Thus, it solves
the problem better and reduces stress.
• Meta-processes such as communication, status, and process tracking can be fa-
cilitated through online systems. As teams grow, just tracking the interaction
and communication among all parties can become a burden. Automating that
can eliminate hours of manual work for each person. For example, a web-
based system that lets people see the status of their order as it works its way
through approval processes eliminates the need for status reports, leaving