Enterprise Roadmap to SRE

Chapter 5. Actively Nurturing Success

Once you’ve decided that SRE is worth pursuing for your organization and resolved to invest in it, it’s important to ensure that your investment is a successful one. It’s always hard to introduce change into a system, but it’s even harder to make that change stick. Here are some tips on how to keep SRE working in your organization.

Think Big, Act Small

The statement, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” is frequently associated with Edwards Deming. The full quote, however, is “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—a costly myth.” SRE, at its core, is a metrics-driven methodology. No amount of SLOs or SLIs, however, will help you understand whether your SRE adoption is both working and aligned with your enterprise strategy. You’ll have to find this out through continuous experimentation and learning.

In previous chapters we’ve asked you to “think big,” but when it comes to nurturing success, you should “act small.” Any kind of large-scale change is achieved iteratively and incrementally, and SRE isn’t immune from these challenges. There’s also an obvious caveat to this—if you have too short of a timeline, you won’t be able to make meaningful change, so be prepared to find the balance.

Google internally uses shared objectives and key results (OKRs) to align teams and set goals when it’s not always clear how they’ll be achieved. Your organization might have its own processes to do this, but they ...