Reflect on something I asked for

I asked for direct access to production systems, with the appropriate training in the change control process. Though even read-only access would help.

Why? Because our team has to diagnose the cause of issues in production, and having to open tickets to get log files and then chase multiple times gets boring quite quickly.

But this is demanding one particular strategy to meet our need for less friction in discharging our operational responsibilities. So let’s step back to the need. We regularly need particular bits of information from the production systems. The system sends us emails about problems with a certain set of information, but it’s often not enough. So we need to get other log files, or the output of particular commands, to fully understand what happened.

However 90% (maybe 95%) of the time, what we need is one of 3 particular things. So another strategy would be to change the email report to include those things. Then most of the time we won’t need to open Ops tickets and we won’t need to access production. That seems like it would meet most of the need without big struggles or worries about a bigger change to the practices in the company.

I still intend to write down the broad responsibilities and access around these and other things, to guide me towards other points of friction. But as I identify the friction, I will try very hard to not get too attached to the first strategy I think of.