soft_skills.rst

Soft Skills

What is the role of ops?

Maintain and grow infrastructure as needed.

Protect data from internal and external threats, hardware failure.

Be enablers and problem solvers, not a hinderance. The antithesis of the BOFH.

Business Savvy

Why we do what we do. Supporting business needs.

Selling system changes and new proposals

Negotiating budgetary constraints vs. need/want requirements

Communicating with internal and external customers

• Managing maintenance windows

Evaluating a product offering

The importance of Documentation

What to document

• Runbooks? SOP? (cparedes: might be worthwhile even though we want to automate SOP’s away as much as possible - what should we check at 2 AM? What do folks typically do in this situation if automation fails?)
• Architecture and design (cparedes: also maybe talk about why we choose that design - what problems did we try to solve? Why is this a good solution?) How to manage documentation

Documentation through Diagrams

Project Management (Does time management go here too?)

Working with other teams

Where do you go from here?

How to get help, keep sharp, learn new skills, and network within the systems community.

Mailing lists

Local user groups

LOPSA

Twitter

ServerFault

Sign up and participate. As your own questions, but also answer questions that look interesting to you. This will not only help the community, but can keep you sharp, even on technologies you don’t work with on a daily basis.

Books (and concepts worth “Googling”)

• Web Operations, John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins
• The Art of Capacity Planning, John Allspaw
• Blueprints for High Availability, Evan Marcus and Hal Stern
• Resilience Engineering, Erik Hollnagel
• Human Error, James Reason
• To Engineer is Human, Henry Petroski
• To Forgive Design, Henry Petroski

Agile

Kanban

Scrum

The Tao of DevOps

What is DevOps

What isn’t DevOps

Why devops is important