Are your technical practices burning out your team?

I can still remember the fear and anxiety that I used to get leading up to a production go-live early on in my career. The thought of having to work until 2am trying to troubleshoot issues while being dialled into a conference call with stakeholders all asking; ‘are we there yet?’, ‘how much longer?’, ‘What’s the issue?’ was overwhelming. And while this wasn’t the case for every production release it certainly was for the majority of them.

Deployment pain is real for any engineers or technical staff working on a production go-live and has significant impacts on both organisational performance and culture.

It’s important to measure your deployment pain as it can be an indication that your technical practices are not sustainable. For example, if your deployments need to be done after hours it’s a sign that your solution has architectural issues. These days it is entirely possible to build large complex distributed systems that are fully automated with zero downtime.

Left unchecked deployment pain can lead to burnout. Burnout manifests itself as a feeling of helplessness and is often correlated with wasteful, unproductive work, resulting in increased sick time and excessive job turnover.

According to Christina Maslach, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley there are six risk factors that predict burnout.

1.      Work overload

2.      Lack of control

3.      Insufficient rewards

4.      Breakdown of community

5.      Absence of fairness

6.      Value conflicts

All these six factors are things that management and organisations have the power to change.

There have been several studies over the years on how effective management combined with technical approaches, such as continuous delivery, can improve organisational culture and performance. While these studies were based on Lean Management and DevOps practices the purpose of this article is not about advocating a methodology or approach but rather show the relationship between technical practices, performance and culture.

People are the organisations’ biggest asset so we should be using any techniques that we can to make sure that we have access to the necessary tools and resources to improve our own work ensure and that we are doing meaningful work.