Rapid migration to digital services enables greater innovation, including better products for customers, but it also introduces operational challenges, with many DevOps and SRE teams spending the majority of their time firefighting incidents vs delivering on innovation. The challenge in finding the right balance between feature velocity and these operational concerns is twofold:
If technology organizations put all available resources into quickly developing new features and functionality, poor performance will affect customer satisfaction. If technology organizations spend too much time carefully innovating on products, the slow rollout of new technologies will enable competitors to get the upper hand.
We’ve seen similar situations in the past: With the rise of the internet economy, companies needed new software development methodologies, and agile software development emerged. With the rise of the public cloud, traditional operations practices also showed signs of strain, and DevOps and SRE practices were adopted into the mainstream.
Incident management plays a critical role in delivering an overall positive customer experience and continued innovation. So what would it look like if we applied agile principles to the incident management process?