dgarros
New question for future surveys
Looking at the 2019 results, we see the results heavily weighted on automating provisioning.
While it is easy to understand why that is the case, I think the survey should also cover the “WHYs” of automating the network and not just the “HOWs”.
With that, I would like to propose few new questions, perhaps in a new section of the survey, to address not just the “WHYs” but also what the next steps are and which is the ultimate goal for the respondents.
Q1) Why do you automate the network ? Q2) what are your next steps in terms of automation ? Q3) What is your achiavable end goal with automation ?
@dmontagner I think it's a great idea to add a section to cover the WHY For each questions we need to define the list of valid responses. could you propose something to start the discussion? thanks
I personally think we need to limit the number of open responses as much as possible because it's been creating a lot of work in the background to clean the responses and it makes it hard to generate reports
@dgarros I have added few more questions and their respective suggested answers (feel free to re-order them according to the survey flow):
Q1) What is the main reason why you and your team automate the network ? (choose one)
- q1.a1: automation is still an afterthought for us.
- q1.a2: to complete the work faster.
- q1.a3: to relief the team from manual and repetitive tasks.
- q1.a4: to reduce mistakes in the network.
- q1.a5: to deliver agility, resilience and scalability to the business.
Q2) what are your next steps in terms of automation ? (choose one)
- q2.a1: We have just started! Our next step is to develop more and more scripts and playbooks.
- q2.a2: Extend our scripts and playbooks to other domains of the network.
- q2.a3: We have ad-hoc script and automation deployed. Our next step is to develop a strategy to take our automation to the next level.
- q2.a4: We have completed our automation strategy. Our next step is executing on the strategy.
- q2.a5: We are collecting measurable business benefits delivered by our automation strategy. Our next step is to amplify the benefits.
Q3) What is your achievable end goal with automation ? (choose one)
- q3.a1: we just want to eliminate repetitive and manual work
- q3.a2: automate provisioning
- q3.a3: automate provisioning and assurance
- q3.a4: automate the complete network lifecycle (build, test, deploy and operate)
- q3.a5: make our automation inherent and align its strategy and execution with the business strategy
Q4) About the working culture (multiple choice)
- q4.a1: we operate in silos
- q4.a2: we operate under a blame culture
- q4.a3: we feel comfortable in making mistakes when we have good intentions and are trying to do the right thing
- q4.a4: we have a blameless culture and debrief on incidents to identify what needs to be improved
- q4.a5: our operational environment is built with multiple safety mechanisms to quickly contain the blast radius of incidents making it safe for operations to work and experiment
Q1 is only useful if it's known who the demo is of the people responding. Are the people managers / IT leaders or people just trying to get stuff done?
Q2 is good. Nice!
Q3 is strange, because I don't ever hear anyone ever being "done" getting to automation. Many organizations are still in phase 0 or phase 1 of a potentially long-term six-phase automation roadmap. Maybe reframe the question as "What percentage of tasks have you been able to automate in the following domains of your network?" The domains can be different network device types like data center vs enterprise vs wireless vs firewall vs load balancing etc.
Q4 seems a bit like "leading," maybe something like "What business or cultural issues prevent your organization from automating more aspects of the network?" Answers could be something like budget, distrust in automation tooling, fear of layoffs/redundancy, poor leadership / no automation strategy, security concerns, skills gaps, etc.
I think Q1 is good, and to @abenokraitis 's point it will go well with #66 to have more context about the person who's responding to the question I'm not sure if I understand properly the difference between Q1 and Q3, they look redundant to me.
For Q2, I'm afraid the responses would be hard to read because everyone doesn't have the same definition of what an automation strategy is or how far they are in the implementation of their strategy. I think it's the classic you don't know what you don't know situation.
For Q4, I like @abenokraitis's proposal to focus on the blockers to deploy more automation and we can include the risk aversion culture as part of it.
@dgarros
Q1 is about the WHY while Q3 is more like a tangible and measurable outcome.
Q2: the point is that you need to have a strategy regardless what that is. And it is better to aligned with the business.
Q4: the understanding of the culture gives you the understanding of the blockers and helps building a plan for improving the culture. But I agree we could have a question specifically about the blockers.
On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 at 05:52, Damien Garros [email protected] wrote:
I think Q1 is good, and to @abenokraitis https://github.com/abenokraitis 's point it will go well with #66 https://github.com/dgarros/netdevops-survey/pull/66 to have more context about the person who's responding to the question
I'm not sure if I understand properly the difference between Q1 and Q3, they look redundant to me.
For Q2, I'm afraid the responses would be hard to read because everyone doesn't have the same definition of what an automation strategy is or how far they are in the implementation of their strategy. I think it's the classic you don't know what you don't know situation.
For Q4, I like @abenokraitis https://github.com/abenokraitis's proposal to focus on the blockers to deploy more automation and we can include the risk aversion culture as part of it.
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Q1 I know you guys all like the WHY?. I don’t actually find the WHY very interesting. I think most people automate for pretty much all the reasons listed. They're all good reasons. I don’t really care which one is the main one. But I’m not against having the question if y’all like it. I don’t think it’s bad, just meh :-)
Q2 I like the idea of asking “what’s your next step”, it is an interesting question. But I agree with @dgarros that it doesn’t work very well as a multiple choice question. This is one of those where really everybody has a different answer. And at the end, if we just end up assessing how long people have done automation for and what operations they automate, we won’t have learned anything we didn’t already know from other questions.
Q3 I agree with @abenokraitis , and not sure it’s worth asking if we end up just trying to measure automation.
Q4 I like it as a blockers question, as suggested above
