Designing for Operations - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 42

If you are fortunate enough to be involved in early development of a system, work with
developersandhelpthemsetprioritiessothatthesefeaturesare“bakedin”fromthebegin-
ning. It also helps if the business team driving the requirements can recognize the needs of
operations.
2.2.2 Request Features as They Are Identified
More likely a service does not contain all of the operational features desired because it is
impossible to know what will be needed before the system is in operation. If you have ac-
cess to the developers, these features can be requested over time. First and foremost, speak
up about your operations needs—file a feature request for every missing feature. The fea-
ture request should identify the problem that needs to be solved rather than the specific
implementation. List the risks and impact to the business so that your request can be pri-
oritized. Work collaboratively with the developers as they implement the features. Make
yourself available for consultation with the developers, and offer encouragement.
Developer time and resources are limited, so it is important to prioritize your requests.
One strategy for prioritization is to select the item that will have the biggest impact for the
smallest amount of effort. Figure 2.1 shows a graph where the x -axis is the expected im-
pact of a change, ranging from low- to high-impact. The y -axis represents the amount of
effort required to create the change, also ranging from easy (low effort) to hard (high ef-
fort).Itistemptingtofocusontheeasiesttasksor“low-hangingfruit.”However,thisoften
ends up wasting resources on easy tasks that have very little impact. That outcome may be
emotionally satisfying but does not solve operational problems. Instead, you should focus
onthehigh-impact itemsexclusively,startingwiththelow-effortprojectswhileselectively
choosing the ones that require larger effort.