Balance your team! Balance yourself!

Now it’s meditation. Bill Gates wrote that even he - as a longtime nonbeliever - has started to  meditate. I have now 27 sessions in and counting. My app is counting. 

By meditating, I have learned to focus and concentrate. When my mind starts to get distracted, I notice that, and I slightly bring back my focus. I scan my body. Listen to my mind. Focus on my breath. 

Because of modern news consumption and social media distraction my attention span has been shrinking. The endless scrolling makes my mind distracted and unsteady. But I’ve realized that though meditation, I regain the stability and focus that I lose in social media. So, now, it’s a balance. And I know I need to rebalance when I hear my inner voice say “Time’s up! No more scrolling!” 

Balance is also a challenge in DevOps. We have to calibrate between developing new features or investing time in stability. A mature team has team members who can work in both areas. When we get it right, it’s our superpower. The team becomes more than the sum of its parts. It gains the flexibility your company requires. But how do we know when the right time is to shift the capacity and focus? For our business, timing is key. 

I have my inner voice which tells me when I’ve spent enough time distracted. In DevOps we have the error budget - a method that gained popularity from the site-reliability engineering (SRE) movement started at Google.

Each error your system has, consumes the error budget. It's a time limit, a capacity limit. By setting a capacity-budget for errors, we acknowledge that our software requires ongoing improvement. This acknowledgement stops ongoing negotiations with the business to delay features and gets additional hours to work on technical debt. If your capacity-budget is consumed before the month’s end, the team switches priorities. No new features will be started, no new features are getting pushed to production. The DevOps team shifts capacity to work on reliability and stability of the application.

For me it’s not easy to realize when it’s the right moment to rest and increase my concentration skills. Sometimes it's a slow process, like when it's getting hot. You don’t realize it immediately. But when you realize that it's too hot, you can’t rest, breathe and focus until it's comfortable again.

That’s similar to our IT business. Incidents are slowly coming in, sometimes more. Servers are getting restarted and time is spent on rewriting some technical issues and investigating some log files. Sometimes one team member is doing it. Sometimes another one. It is difficult to keep an overview. But the error budget is objective, it shows you the real temperature by counting the time spent dealing with errors. Once the error budget kicks in, you can quickly pivot. Then you feel the force of the DevOps super power. 

I never thought that I would end up using mediation. What about you? Do you think you’ll give the Error Budget a try?

In DevOps, we balance between new features and stability with the Error Budget