Improving communicating changes and incidents to users

[AntonyBishop]

Background

We recently asked users to make changes in support of an upgrade. It was clear from the progress that teams were not getting the comms. Our current process assumes that all users will go to (and are actively watching) the #cloud-platform-update slack channel.

This isn't the case. I want make users go to that channel, and the result is lots of chasing up progress by our team. As the platform scales this approach isn't sustainable.

So we should consider other communication channels that better align to our user processes in addition to #cloud-platform-update.

From user feedback it appears that users respond better to group/team emails. We actually ask teams to provide a team email address when creating a namespace. If we can extract that information we can then create a distribution list and email our message to users.

This story is to write a script to obtain that list of email addresses for use when we need it. This will not be a canonical list and I would expect us to run the script each time we need to issue comms.

The email addresses out public as they are in public repos, but I would not recommend collating this information in a cloud platform report.

Proposed user journey

As a team we can generate a list of email addresses from information we capture for namespace creation so that we can reach more of our users with important message and reduce the amount of manual chasing due to users not seeing important messages.

Approach

Create a script

Which part of the user docs does this impact

If we can do this we will update our communications plan to include this form of communications.

Questions / Assumptions

N/A

Definition of done

• [ ] We can produce a list of emails for user namespaces when required.

Reference

How to write good user stories

[Matt-Alinosn]

Matt and Chike to speak with @imkatiewatson if this is included in her ongoing work.