Don’t let one 'war room' too many exacerbate the risk of quiet quitting in your DevOps team

As organizations and their customers become more reliant on digital services, DevOps teams are often required to get together quickly to troubleshoot and resolve outages or user experience problems.

However, against the backdrop of the 24/7 economy and a shortage of technology skills, it’s time to reassess whether these 'war rooms' remain an effective tactic for dealing with urgent issues. Or, could they be exacerbating the challenges organizations face in retaining staff and managing skilled DevOps teams’ workloads?

The straw that breaks the camel’s back

Organizations are at a crunch point. Efforts to accelerate innovation continue to drive growth opportunities and improved user experiences. But to enable this, organizations are adopting cloud-native architectures at a rapid pace, which causes IT environments to become more complex and difficult to manage. In fact, 71 percent of CIOs say the explosion of data produced by cloud-native technology stacks is beyond human ability to manage.

This constant push for innovation and the resulting complexity is ramping up the pressure on IT departments, which has led to two in five workers across the tech sector showing a high risk of burnout. That presents a major problem as DevOps professionals become unable to work or more likely to change roles. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of CIOs say it has become harder to attract and retain skilled IT operations and development professionals.

Organizations must also recognize that working culture has shifted since the pandemic. Following a period of high-stress and longer working hours, many employees are now seeking a better work-life balance. The ongoing trend of "quiet quitting" is the embodiment of this, highlighting the risks of an increasingly disengaged workforce that no longer see the value in working extra hours. In this context, the high stress environment of a war room can deepen the cracks for organizations and make their resourcing issues harder to solve. Already under pressure, the looming threat of an emergency phone call at 3am could be the final straw for a burnt-out DevOps professional.

Going out on the offensive

Whilst 'war rooms' have been effective for resolving digital service problems in the past, ultimately, they now enforce a reactive approach to managing systems performance and user experiences. As a result, organizations that rely on them are always on the back foot, forced into firefighting mode the moment that problems arise. The reality is that there are more effective ways to resolve problems and maintain frictionless user journeys.

As the pressure to accelerate digital transformation heightens, there’s no longer time for making educated guesses, or the finger-pointing that comes with 'war rooms.' To ease the burden on overstretched resources, organizations need to transform the way their DevOps teams work, by going on the offensive. They need to eliminate the reliance on manual problem solving and equip their teams with solutions that can uncover the precise answers needed to resolve problems before they become critical. This ensures that organizations can be proactive in addressing issues that may impact application and infrastructure performance, so they can safeguard user experience. They also need these capabilities to be delivered through a platform that enables teams to collaborate more effectively, to eliminate the blame game culture that is often pervasive in 'war room' scenarios.

A more proactive approach also reduces the likelihood of critical outages or problems that require 'war rooms' in the first place. Freed from some of the manual and repetitive tasks they previously carried out to identify and resolve issues, DevOps teams can make their resources go further, and refocus on driving innovation.

The future is self-healing

The world’s reliance on digital services will only increase, so organizations must future-proof their ability to monitor and resolve issues across their increasingly complex technology stacks. This will drive more organizations towards introducing self-healing capabilities, so their teams can harness AI to identify problems as they begin to emerge in real time, then automate the resolution to remove the need for human intervention. This will result in much quicker time to resolution, reducing the impact of performance issues on customers and alleviating the pressure on DevOps teams. 

These capabilities might sound years away, but many organizations are already well on the road to making them a reality. For instance, BT is targeting a full self-healing system by 2025, building on its modern service management stack. BT estimates this move will drive cumulative savings of £28 million by 2027, as its services become more reliable and internal teams are able to reduce manual effort.

However far along the journey towards self-healing systems they are, organizations should see that 'war rooms' no longer need to be the only option for issue management. Instead, organizations should modernize their approach to problem resolution to make their digital services more reliable and protect the work-life balance of their teams. In turn, DevOps teams will be free to concentrate on delivering outstanding user journeys for customers and driving innovation that creates lasting business value.

Image Credit: Wayne Williams

Greg Adams is Regional Vice President, UK & Ireland, Dynatrace.