OPS03-BP07 Resource teams appropriately
Provision the right amount of proficient team members, and provide tools and resources to support your workload needs. Overburdening team members increases the risk of human error. Investments in tools and resources, such as automation, can scale the effectiveness of your team and help them support a greater number of workloads without requiring additional capacity.
Desired outcome:
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You have appropriately staffed your team to gain the skillsets needed for them to operate workloads in AWS in accordance with your migration plan. As your team has scaled itself up during the course of your migration project, they have gained proficiency in the core AWS technologies that the business plans to use when migrating or modernizing their applications.
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You have carefully aligned your staffing plan to make efficient use of resources by leveraging automation and workflow. A smaller team can now manage more infrastructure on behalf of the application development teams.
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With shifting operational priorities, any resource staffing constraints are proactively identified to protect the success of business initiatives.
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Operational metrics that report operational toil (such as on-call fatigue or excessive paging) are reviewed to verify that staff are not overwhelmed.
Common anti-patterns:
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Your staff have not ramped up on AWS skills as you close in on your multi-year cloud migration plan, which risks support of the workloads and lowers employee morale.
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Your entire IT organization is shifting into agile ways of working. The business is prioritizing the product portfolio and setting metrics for what features need to be developed first. Your agile process does not require teams to assign story points to their work plans. As a result, it is impossible to know the level of capacity required for the next amount of work, or if you have the right skills assigned to the work.
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You are having an AWS partner migrate your workloads, and you don't have a support transition plan for your teams once the partner completes the migration project. Your teams struggle to efficiently and effectively support the workloads.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: You have appropriately-skilled team members available in your organization to support the workloads. Resource allocation can adapt to shifting priorities without impacting performance. The result is teams being proficient at supporting workloads while maximizing time to focus on innovating for customers, which in turn raises employee satisfaction.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium
Implementation guidance
Resource planning for your cloud migration should occur at an organizational level that aligns to your migration plan, as well as the desired operating model being implemented to support your new cloud environment. This should include understanding which cloud technologies are deployed for the business and application development teams. Infrastructure and operations leadership should plan for skills gap analysis, training, and role definition for engineers who are leading cloud adoption.
Implementation steps
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Define success criteria for team's success with relevant operational metrics such as staff productivity (for example, cost to support a workload or operator hours spent during incidents).
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Define resource capacity planning and inspection mechanisms to verify that the right balance of qualified capacity is available when needed and can be adjusted over time.
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Create mechanisms (for example, sending a monthly survey to teams) to understand work-related challenges that impact teams (like increasing responsibilities, changes in technology, loss of personnel, or increase in customers supported).
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Use these mechanisms to engage with teams and spot trends that may contribute to employee productivity challenges. When your teams are impacted by external factors, reevaluate goals and adjust targets as appropriate. Identify obstacles that are impeding your team's progress.
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Regularly review if your currently-provisioned resources are still sufficient, of if additional resources are needed, and make appropriate adjustments to support teams.
Level of effort for the implementation plan: Medium
Resources
Related best practices:
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