📚 Document All Operations Engineering Projects

connormaglynn commented 5 days ago

👀 Purpose

This ticket initially came from a retro action and is to help enable the team to prioritise work by identifying all of our projects
To enable the team to identify opportunities to decommission low-value projects/services
To enable the team to identify projects that may sit better in a different part of the organisation
To enable the team to effectively manage and prioritise projects

✅ Definition of Done

[x] We have a full list of products, services, tools and projects that Operations Engineering currently manage
[ ] Each item will have at least the following data points (some may need to be discussed with the team)
- [x] Current Phase of Delivery
- [ ] Proposed Next Steps

📓 Notes

Operations Engineering offer services and products and many different scopes i.e. automated processes such as the standards-compliant label, web interfaces such as Standards Reports, third-party tooling management such as GitHub, support services such as SSL generation and renewals - all of these should be captured

connormaglynn commented 5 days ago

🆙 Update

Created a Spreadsheet of all of the Operations Engineering Projects, Components and Processes here

Need to work through the list with @AntonyBishop to determine what the desired next phase for the projects are

Decided not to go into a full detail of everything we do regarding Third Party Tooling (unless there was something explicit for it) - but I did include the Third Party Tooling Responsibility Matrix Spreadsheet which indicates some of the responsibilities we have regarding each tool

connormaglynn commented 2 days ago

Added a new column to indicate a processes/projects maturity using the Capability Maturity Model Integration
Added a new column to indicate whether we want to Improve/Remove the process/project
Added a new column to indicate how we might progress the process/project to the next level of maturity (if we want to improve it). At the moment, this fails into two broad categories of "Active Development" i.e. build more features, increase documentation and runbooks etc. or "Discovery" to understand more about the problem space and value.

[ ] Run through the list and assessments with a few people from the team (one being @AntonyBishop)

Just having the "Current Phase" column didn't provide much insight into our processes, because almost everything is in a "Support and Maintenance" phase. The addition of a formal Maturity Model should help us prioritise the work and allocate efforts more effectively.

connormaglynn commented 1 day ago

Added a comprehensive framework on top of the Capability Maturity Model Integration with in-depth criteria and definitions for each level. This is to ensure we apply the model consistently and have guidance on how to mature processes throughout the model 📖
I have walked through the framework and several processes with @abachleda-baca @PepperMoJ @tamsinforbes and received positive initial feedback 🥳
I have used the data to produce some metrics, as shown below 👇 I believe we could use these in the monthly check-ins to articulate team health and progress towards priorities

[ ] Finish the initial assessment of each process (later to be reviewed with @AntonyBishop)

Not all processes have been implemented in this first draft, but ideally, this can be used as a base to iterate on i.e. we add processes to this spreadsheet as the team gains more awareness of them
Through this process, we have also identified a large estate we wish to remove, so further tickets from this investigation piece of work will be created to facilitate the removal of some processes