Implementing Service Level Objectives

Chapter 16. SLO Advocacy

Daria Barteneva and Eva Parish

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Andy Warhol

Previous chapters have explored how to get buy-in from your organization when adopting SLOs, and the importance of building an SLO culture. By now, you understand why your organization needs SLOs and how much they will impact your engineering processes and your users. You can’t wait to start advocating for SLOs across your organization!

But wait—there are three questions you need to answer before beginning:

• Do you have leadership buy-in on implementing SLOs in your organization? It can be helpful to have an executive sponsor with a vested interest in SLO implementation who will be able to support you and unblock you in the case of conflicts of interest.

• Does your management chain agree on expectations and the time investment required to drive SLO adoption? Being an SLO Advocate will probably be a full-time job for you for the first few months (or even longer if you’re in a large organization).

• Are you ready to have a horizontal role that impacts an entire organization? Such a role will require skills in multiple domains, from communicating with senior leadership and stakeholders, to writing documentation, to analyzing data and building reporting, to reviewing monitoring implementation, to delivering training, and more.

If you answered yes to all three questions, congratulations: you’re ready to be an SLO Advocate. But ...