How to Avoid Meetings – Maia Sauren
- What Distributed/International Teams involves
- Lots of late meetings
- Not up on the inclusive languages
- We’d language quirks from ESL speakers
- Taxonomy changes between fields
- Stereotypes are incomplete
- Ask Culture vs Guess Culture
- Micro-cultures , down to schools, extra years.
- When you make a private joke without context, someone is left out
- What governance model wins (who do they raise barriers for)
- It’s harder to change a relationship over the phone than maintain one
- A relationship with a CoC is less fragile (shouldn’t be figured out in the fly during conflict)
- “How do you want to have arguments?”
- Set standards early and resolve swiftly
- Normalise conflict resolution
- Adulting: it’s for people who don’t want to cry even more later
- What have you done this week you are proud of?
Disaster Recovery Book – Svetlana Marina
- Software Development Process
- Speaning all time “firefighting” so no time to improve processes
- Operation Support Model
- Incident Model
- Alert Raise
- Initial Response
- Runbook should have: Alert type -> Investigation help, exact queries into log search, links
- Impact, escalations, SLA
- Send email to stakeholders, keep their trust
- Include “communication required” in runbook
- Investigation and Damage control
- Do what is required to fix problem, not fix the root cause
- Message to stakeholders again
- Through Investigation (depends on situation)
- Fix root cause
- Post Incident Review
The Bus Plan: Junior Staff Training – Andrew Jeffree
- Staff coming into industries with lots of automation, but what when automation fails?
- Staff only know about automation, can only run a playbook, don’t understand what it does
- Disclaimer: Automation isn’t bad.
- Config Managment, Custom tooling, CICD, Infrastructure as code
- Buttons
- Need to understand what they do
- Sometimes they are not there
- Can be Hard to implement a button that doesn’t exist
- Do it the manual way
- Training
- Do something manually (install wordpress) and document
- Expand what you have done
- Tweak it
- Break and fix it
- Don’t be afraid to change something manually
- Questions
- Split for new people – 30% training , 70% work
- Manual -> ansible -> puppet
- Don’t want them to be stuck in the mindset that everthing we do is the best way
When Agile Doesn’t Work Anymore: Managing a Large Documentation Project – Lana Brindley
- We all age
- Sometimes old docs should just be binned
- Old docs base, massive changes needed, but wanted to save it
- Changes to toolchain too
- Proof of concept
- Define how big the job will be, what is involved
- Get buy-in
- Plan, Plan, Plan
- Create a real timeline
- Advertise your plan, tell everybody about it
- Do a presentation to team for each phase
- Research
- Who is your audience?
- No, really, who is your audience? – eg Sales and support may use docs more than customers
- Lets the customers know that “somebody cares about these docs”
- User/task analysis
- Where do we need to focus work
- What are the big tasks
- Do the thing
- You have to sit down and write it
- You are breaking the agile system
- You need to track your work and who doing what
- eg this case, moving from big chapters to small topic-based docs.
- Agree ahead of time on process, have buy-in
- Review
- What went on?
- WHo not to stuff it up next time
- Try not to blame people too much
- Agile vs … something else
- Sometimes Agile is not the best model
- Tips for working outside Agile
- Outreach
- Especially product owners.
- Get people on board
- Track your work
- Create Epics of sprints
- Don’t go overboard
- Should about it
- outreach never stops
- Present at sprint reviews
- Brownbags
- Outreach
