Operations in a Distributed World - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 165

Toil Reduction
Toilismanualworkthatisparticularlyexhausting.Ifateamcalculatesthenumberofhours
spent on toil versus normal project work, that ratio should be as low as possible. Manage-
ment may set a threshold such that if it goes above 50 percent, the team pauses all new
features and works to solve the big problems that are the source of so much toil. (See Sec-
tion 12.4.2 . )
Fix-It Days
Aday(orseriesofdays)canbesetasidetoreducetechnicaldebt. Technical debt istheac-
cumulation of small unfinished amounts of work. By themselves, these bits and pieces are
noturgent,buttheaccumulationofthemstartstobecomeaproblem.Forexample,aDocu-
mentation Fix-It Day would involve everyone stopping all other work to focus on bugs re-
lated to documentation that needs to be improved. Alternatively, a Fix-It Week might be
declared to focus on bringing all monitoring configurations up to a particular standard.
Often teams turn fix-its into a game. For example, at the start a list of tasks (or bugs) is
published. Prizes are given out to the people who resolve the most bugs. If done company-
wide, teams may receive T-shirts for participating and/or prizes for completing the most
tasks.
7.4 Virtual Office
Many operations teams work from home rather than an office. Since work is virtual, with
remote hands touching hardware when needed, we can work from anywhere. Therefore, it
is common to work from anywhere. When necessary, the team meets in chat rooms or oth-
er virtual meeting spaces rather than physical meeting rooms. When teams work this way,
communication must be more intentional because you don't just happen to see each other
in the office.
Itisgoodtohaveapolicythatanyonewhoisnotworkingfromtheofficetakesrespons-
ibility for staying in touch with the team. They should clearly and periodically communic-
ate their status. In turn, the entire team should take responsibility for making sure remote
workers do not feel isolated. Everyone should know what their team members are working
onand take the time to include everyone in discussions. There are many tools that can help
achieve this.