The Method

I offer a consultancy and advisory service that specialises in teams that are busy.

What that means can include:

• Teams that are doing more ’tactical’ day-to-day work than they should be.
• Teams that feel like they’re not sure what success looks like; that want to demonstrate to their stakeholders that they’re doing important work.
• Teams that are trying to modernise processes, technology and organisational design, and aren’t sure where to start (or continue!)
• Teams that may be struggling with motivation, attrition or mild to major existential crises based on any or all of the above.

The approach I take generally consists of two complementary approaches:

• Computer

  • Technical consulting for high-availability systems design.
  • Building good services with meaningful KPIs/SLOs.
  • Advice on practices around observability, meaningful alerting and metrics.
  • Oncall and operational practices that work with your org and team.
  • Org-level guidance around incidents, how they’re managed (Incident Command), what we learn from them and how to keep stakeholders happy.

• Human

  • Team charter remit workshopping. Team reboot planning with existing leadership.
  • Building and developing good inter-team relationships across timezones.
  • Key guidance around ownership, sponsoring of key folks and building on existing capabilities.
  • Specific coaching/mentoring for key team members and leadership. See also my coaching practice.

The overarching goal is to enable cultural and values-based changes that will far outlast my involvement. The model of engagement (embed with the team, assess via review, etc.) is up to you.

I have extensive experience in all the above, at planet-level scale. I wrote the chapter of the Google SRE book on busy teams. See my profile for more.