Starting an Ops Team

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) supports humanitarian efforts around the world. In 2014, UN OCHA made the bold move to start bringing its public-facing websites into a single infrastructure. Two years into the process, the teams are now truly working as an integrated team on a shared platform. Emma Jane Hogbin Westby explains how UN OCHA turned those lessons inward to coordinate its shared-services platform and offers an overview of the types of work that the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs supports and the digital platform that the services are delivered from.

Topics include:

- Matching your infrastructure setup to the capacity of your team
- Building a globally distributed, inclusive team
- How to start a community of practice

Transcript

1. Starting an Ops Team
   @emmajanehw
   Emma Jane Hogbin Westby www.unocha.org
   

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2. Agenda
   0. Origin story
   Lessons Learned
   1. Building inclusive teams
   2. Starting a community of practice
   3. Growing your tech with your team
   

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3. Origin story
   

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4. Humanitarian
   Programme
   Cycle
   https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/en/programme-cycle/space
   

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5. Humanitarian
   Programme
   Cycle
   https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/system/files/hpc_reference_module_2015_final_.pdf
   

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6. http://www.unocha.org/what-we-do/coordination-tools/cluster-coordination
   

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7. (Most of) the
   Teams We Support
   

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8. Pre 2014
   Fast-moving, disparate teams.
   Duplicate costs for hosting.
   No infrastructure support for:
   - very large (high traffic) sites;

   - for small sites.
   Origin Story
   

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9. Circa 2014
   All web properties consolidated into a single
   infrastructure.
   Opted to use a managed hosting company already in use
   by OCHA with containers running on racked hardware.
   Origin Story
   

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10. Circa 2014
    All web properties consolidated into a single
    infrastructure.
    Opted to use a managed hosting company already in use
    by OCHA with containers running on racked hardware.
    Origin Story
    we’ll come back to this later
    

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11. Transition
    Ops support was handled by
    - managed hosting staff

    - third-party ops consulting company
    with the intention of bringing this support in-house 

    “at some point”.
    Origin Story
    

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12. Genesis of the Ops Team (2014)
    OCHA Ops Team
    0.5 FTE ops

    from one of the existing dev teams
    1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    front end developer turned dev team
    project manager turned ops maven (that's
    me).
    

    Phase2 Ops Team
    0.2 FTE ops

    consulting firm
    0.1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    experienced ops PM
    BlackMesh Ops Team
    as-needed ops support

    managed hosting company
    0.1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    experienced ops PM
    Origin Story
    FTE = Full Time Equivalent
    

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13. Genesis of the Ops Team (March 2016)
    OCHA Ops Team
    0.5 FTE ops

    from one of the existing dev teams
    1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    front end developer turned dev team
    project manager turned ops maven (that's
    me).
    

    Phase2 Ops Team
    0.2 FTE ops

    consulting firm
    0.1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    experienced ops PM
    BlackMesh Ops Team
    as-needed ops support

    managed hosting company
    0.1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    experienced ops PM
    Origin Story
    That’s us!
    FTE = Full Time Equivalent
    

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14. Genesis of the Ops Team (June 2016)
    OCHA Ops Team
    0.5 FTE ops

    from one of the existing dev teams
    0.5 FTE ops

    specialist Drupal ops in Australia
    1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    front end developer turned dev team
    project manager turned ops maven (that's
    me).
    Phase2 Ops Team
    0.2 FTE ops

    consulting firm
    0.1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    experienced ops PM
    BlackMesh Ops Team
    as-needed ops support

    managed hosting company
    0.1 FTE coordination /
    project management

    experienced ops PM
    Origin Story
    That’s us now!
    

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15. Timeline
    Consolidation Understanding Building Trust
    Disparate teams
    Origin Story
    < 2014 2014 - 2015 2016
    

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16. Building an
    inclusive team
    myself
    my team
    my community of practice
    

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17. No matter your rank or role
    you are the
    start of an
    inclusive
    team.
    community
    of practice
    team
    self
    

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18. Interlude The moment you’re asked to

    “show progress” is the moment you
    realise you have no metrics.
    

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19. Resource Rich Archbold, Intercom.io
    Leading a Team with Values
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8uuMSb55E
    

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20. version 1.0
    of my
    values-
    based
    metrics
    world premiere!
    

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21. Knowing my values
    significantly reduced
    my option paralysis
    Set boundaries: When devs have root
    access to a shared service what’s
    “allowed”; developing an on-call
    schedule
    Define roles: according to the capacity
    of each team, what’s “ops” and what’s
    “dev”?
    Collaborate on special projects: ops
    pair with developers on configuration
    improvements
    no dev wanted to be part of the on-call roster
    

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22. Building an
    inclusive team
    community
    of practice
    team
    self
    

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23. Lesson 1:
    I thought I was being consistent,
    but as I grew,

    I began valuing
    different attributes and skills.
    

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24. Question: How will you develop and nurture today
    the skills you will need three months
    from now?
    

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25. Lesson 2:
    The skills I nurtured on my
    team three months ago are
    not necessarily the skills I
    need today.
    

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26. Question:
    What action(s) can you take to ensure
    you have a diverse team who will help
    your team grow as the situation
    changes.
    

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27. Starting a
    community of
    practice
    community
    of practice
    team
    self
    

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28. define:
    community of
    practice
    A community of practice is a group of
    people who share a concern or a passion
    for something they do, and learn how to
    do it better as they interact regularly.
    This definition reflects the
    fundamentally social nature of human
    learning. It is very broad.
    http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/what-is-a-community-of-practice/
    

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29. Establishing Communication Channels
    (biweekly) Community of Practice calls
    Flowdock discussion / chat channels
    Documentation on how to report an ops problem
    Weekly newsletter
    Incident reports
    Performance investigations
    Communities of Practice
    

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30. Growing the
    practice
    The practice:

    their interactions produce resources that
    affect their practice (whether they
    engage in actual practice together or
    separately)
    http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/what-is-a-community-of-practice/
    

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31. Resources Produced by the Community
    Tools
    Flowdock discussion /
    chat channels
    “Brown bag” calls
    Shared
    documentation
    Process
    Established
    procedures on how to
    work with ops (e.g.,
    reporting an incident)
    Artefacts
    Weekly newsletter
    Incident reports
    Infra / app
    performance
    investigations
    Communities of Practice
    

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32. The development stages of a CoP
    http://tacitlondon.com/publications/community-of-practice-maturity-model/
    we’re about here
    

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33. Timeline
    Consolidation Understanding Building Trust
    Disparate teams
    Origin Story
    < 2014 2014 - 2015 2016
    All of the communication tools I was using
    to improve shared understanding

    helped to make our team more consistent
    and we began to establish trust.
    

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34. Tuckman’s stages of group development
    Consolidation Understanding Building Trust
    Disparate teams
    Building Teams
    

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35. Tuckman’s stages of group development
    Consolidation Understanding Building Trust
    Disparate teams
    Storm Form Norm Perform
    Building Teams
    

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36. Growing your
    tech with your
    team
    

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37. Understanding what we had inherited
    CentOS 6
    + Docker 1.6
    + GlusterFS 3
    + Insufficient RAM
    Sadness 1.0
    Growing your tech
    

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38. Understanding what we had inherited
    CentOS 6
    + Docker 1.6
    + GlusterFS 3
    + Insufficient RAM
    Sadness 1.0
    Growing your tech
    on three peers
    

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39. Interlude You get better at the thing you practice.
    I’m much better at “incidents” than I
    would like to be.
    

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40. Resource Scott Klein, StatusPage.io

    Effective Incident Communication
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySSdqfZlC7Y
    

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41. It wasn’t
    actually a bad
    decision.
    

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42. But it’s time
    to move on.
    

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43. Lesson 3:
    Having the wrong technology
    today, doesn’t mean you
    made a bad decision.
    

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44. Question:
    How will you establish the trust within
    your team, and community of practice,
    to be able to iterate and improve your
    infrastructure?
    

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45. Summary
    0. Response to humanitarian crisis is publicly documented, and ever-evolving.
    1. If you don’t know where to start in building an inclusive team,

    start by defining your values.
    2. A strong, inclusive community of practice doesn't happen on its own.
    Transparency and trust are essential.
    3. Your infrastructure is used to deploy applications;

    without the trust of the developers, you cannot iterate and improve.
    

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46. I’m hiring!
    If you are, or know, an API developer who would be interested
    in working on an amazing (distributed) team. Please reach out!
    

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47. emma@humanitarianresponse.info
    

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