How to Advocate to Not You: Non-Technical Considerations for our Technical Tools

A presentation at DeveloperWeek Enterprise by Quintessence Anx

One of the things I struggled with as an SRE was being able really grok what non-engineers/non-devs like my manager, whomever they reported to, and various chains in my employer’s business, cared most about when it came time to tool selections. A specific example that I will anonymize and discuss is a business case for changing from Monitoring Tool A to B (Some Anonymous Monitoring System and Some Other Monitoring System) - the final decision isn’t based on B necessarily being a superior tool for a team’s specific technical needs, but rather on other management criteria like license consolidation. Depending on the size of the employer, startup to enterprise, there are increasing numbers of non-engineering folks who have decision making power over the team’s tools. Thus, as devs, ops, etc. we cannot keep our focus on just the technical aspects of different tools and frameworks or we’ll miss the opportunity to appropriately make our case to these other stakeholders. In this talk, I’ll be discussing what these other groups need to know to help them make a decision in your best interest.

*** Important *** To view the ADDO Spring Break recording of this talk, you will need to expand the Cultural Transformation track.

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.