97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 87. Important but Not Urgent: Roadmaps for SREs

Laura Nolan

 

Former American President Dwight D. Eisenhower organized his work according to importance and urgency. Important and urgent tasks were done immediately, and unimportant tasks were delegated or ignored. The most challenging quadrant of Eisenhower’s matrix was the intersection of important and nonurgent—things that made a difference but also were easiest to defer indefinitely. Eisenhower’s approach to this kind of work? Plan.

Eisenhower’s dilemma applies to SRE teams too. Have you ever worked with a problem system that constantly generated toil or downtime but was never redesigned? Ever noticed a team that disagreed over long-term technical direction, in which only one person drove strategy or, worst of all, in which nobody seemed to have a plan that extended past the end of the current quarter? These are the organizational smells of a team requiring a roadmap.

A roadmap is a high-level description of strategic work that a team wants to accomplish in the next couple of years. All SRE teams ought to have a roadmap because it helps teams think beyond the immediate and instead reflect on what work is important. We are engineering teams with operational responsibilities, which lead to urgent, reactive work: putting out fires or acting on requests from other teams. It’s normal (and fine) for some of our work to deal ...