Where/How to start when assembling a new SRE Team.

The below is my interpretation of an interesting talk by Benjamin Bütikofer at USENIX SRECon21. All the good parts are his, and the mash-ups are mine. ( And apologies for the Avengers references in my interpretation, in my head, that kinda fits though you don't necessarily need to agree with it ).

So your company has decided to go "SRE" and have assembled a new Engineers Team.

Maybe it's people redeployed from various teams and a few new hires.

How do we ensure that they all are pulling in the right direction ?.

Let's first figure out what is the Purpose of the team.

• Find and define Team's mission.
• People need to know why they get up in the morning and go to work. We need to give them purpose.
• Align people's mission with the company's vision.

Create a plan and identify what's slowing you down?:

• What is needed to achieve the Goals/mission?
• Reduce interruptions as much as possible. Have scheduled people on support so that rest of the team can fix focus on their deliverables.
• Fix, Hack, workaround roadblocks.

?Adapt your plan to reality:

• Plan and fix Tech debt while we still have control over?the timeframe, else it will come and bite us at the most inopportune of times.

?Build a community :

• Build the culture and invest in the space for spontaneous sharing. People can come together in shared spaces and discuss lots of things. This leads to solutions to many vexed issues. Create shared spaces over virtual coffee, Zoom sessions etc if Physical sharing of space is not as feasible as before.