Automation - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 256

agementreviewsthereprioritizationplansandapprovesputtingotherprojectsonholduntil
balance is achieved.
Systemadministratortimeistoovaluabletobespentonsomethingwithalinearpay-off
like manual work. Toil leads to burn-out and lack of morale. By reducing toil, we not only
help the company but we also help ourselves.
12.4.3 Determining What to Automate First
Apply any and all effort to fix the biggest bottleneck first. There may be multiple areas
where automation is needed. Choose the one with the biggest impact first.
Analyzetheworkandprocessesthattheteamisinvolvedwithtofindthebiggestbottle-
neck.Abottleneck iswhereabacklogofworkaccumulates. Byeliminating thebottleneck,
you improve throughput.
Think about the work being done as an assembly line. A project has many steps and
moves down the assembly line one step at a time. One of those steps is going to be the bot-
tleneck.
Any improvements made upstream of the bottleneck just increase the backlog. It is
temptingtomakeimprovementsabovethebottleneck.Oftentheyareeasyorthefirstthing
you noticed. Sometimes fixing these items improves the efficiency of your team, but the
bottleneck is buried deep in some other team's process. Therefore you have made an im-
provement but the total throughput of the system has not changed. It may even make the
problem worse by creating a bigger traffic jam of work waiting at the bottleneck.
Improvements made downstream of the bottleneck don't help overall throughput.
Again, they may be the easiest improvements that can be made, but if work is not getting
to this part of the system then improving this part will not help the entire system.
Thebottleneckmightnotinvolveatechnicalproblem.Itmaybeaparticularpersonwho
is overloaded or an entire team that is unable to get important tasks done because they are
drowning in small, urgent tasks.
12.5 How to Automate
You can't automate what you can't do manually. The first step in creating automation is
knowingwhatworkneedstobedone.Beginbydoingtheprocessmanuallyanddocument-
ing what is done in a step-by-step manner. Repeat the procedure, following and correcting
the documentation as you go. Have someone else follow the same documentation to make
sure it is clear. This is the best way to discover which steps are ill defined or missing.
The next step toward automation is prototyping. Create tools to do the individual steps
in isolation, making certain that each one is self-contained and works correctly.