View From The Top…DO IT, PROVE IT, KNOW IT, SHARE IT

This is the second in an ongoing series of blog posts from Todd Weeks, Sr. Director of Operations for the Microsoft.com Operations Team.

In my last post, I talked a lot about the “Share It” piece of the work that our team does. How we focus on Innovation and its Impact to your job, and how sharing your accomplishments inside of our team and then external to the company could help broaden its impact even more than we ever could have imagined. It is rewarding to road test your ideas outside the environment they were created. It lets you know how really great they might be, or not, and is an awesome way to learn and grow your knowledge of all the dependencies you may work with.

A focus we began a few years ago was around the basic terms that are in this title, Do It, Prove It and Know It. Simply stated, as an engineer on our team you have goals and objectives, it is expected that these get done and that our customers are delighted with our service in managing their sites and applications, that is Do It. But where the rubber really hits the road is with the “Prove It” space. Developers can write awesome code, the platform can be rock solid and sites can be very stable and there could be very little for the Operations person to do. If you are really providing a lot of value back into the development and the support of the platform, then Prove It, measure it. The way we focused here was to prove your Operational MOF maturity. Your site is highly available and reliable, show the documentation for its disaster recovery scenarios, prove everything has a known configuration and is compliant, have you worked back with Development and Program Management to have great Change Management processes. Over the years, we have made sure to be our own worst critic when it comes to making sure we can answer these questions and show Maturity. We have been able to stay well ahead of the curve, and when it was needed we have provided lots of value back into the groups we work with.

Lastly, Know It. This represents understanding all of the environmental and business impacts of what you run. A site is more than just availability, it costs money to manage and host. Are you aware of those cost structures, do you have business plans that include finding efficiencies and lowering the costs of running your sites? If engineers are only looking at sites from a performance perspective and not a fiscal one, are they really making the right tradeoffs? We have tried to have everyone understand all of the metrics we strive for both operationally and fiscally. This gives a lot more scope and responsibility to even the lowest leveled engineers on your team and allows them to have an even more holistic view of what it is they are a part of.

I am willing to take guidance from anybody that is on my team, no matter what level, because that is where the expertise really lives. So empower everyone to KNOW all of the areas of impact of what they run, and challenge them to be the decision makers. You’ll find it is where most of the Innovative and Great ideas are coming from.