DISCOVERY RESEARCH AT SERVICENOW

Developing an understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), the DevOps transition in the IT industry, and emerging roles and personas

Overview

Methods Discovery research, secondary research, in-depth interviews

Participants DevOps and SRE industry leaders, DevOps Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), ServiceNow IT customers, internal DevOps and SRE subject matter experts

Contribution One of three researchers; I did secondary research, moderated some interviews, did note-taking for some interviews, authored an article for an internal newsletter, contributed to the brown bag deck and storyline, and was one of two presenters at a brown bag event

Deliverables Personas, newsletter article, brown bag presentation, and deck of frameworks and visualizations, Day-In-the-Life of an SRE

Impact Helped educate colleagues, established subject matter expertise, and provided foundational research artifacts for future reference

Context

Product managers and others across the company were asking questions about the concepts of DevOps, Bimodal IT, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) including how they are related to each other, to Information Technology (IT), and to Digital Transformation. Account executives and sales were starting to hear these terms from customers. It was obvious that these emerging topics were important and that as a research team and as an organization we needed to understand them better.

Problem

The goal of this project was to be able to define and understand the relationships between Bimodal IT, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering, and to discover how these topics were relevant now and in the future at our company.

Process

Each of the three researchers on this project came from individual projects that were starting to explore this subject area. We were able to combine what we knew and work together to fill in the gaps. I contributed learnings from customer interviews on site reliability and observability. I sought out resources that DevOps experts and Site Reliability Engineers have made available to help those seeking to learn about these philosophies and roles. I attended virtual conference sessions and webinars. I developed slide decks of frameworks and visualizations, translating what I was learning and iterating on the information as part of the learning process. The team of researchers met often to share what we were learning, workshop our ideas, and converge on the message that we would share with the company.

Excerpts from Deliverables

Impact

The brown bag and news article received positive feedback including comments about how this was the best, most helpful explanation of these subjects that they had heard. The artifacts from this project have been reused by the research team and others to continue spreading knowledge about Bimodal IT, DevOps, and SRE.

Surprises

I was surprised at how long our team of researchers worked to come to agreement on a storyline. At several points, we each told the story, weaving these topics together, but each researcher had a slightly different take on how to tell it and what was important. Acknowledging this allowed us to bring all of the stories together and continue to iterate until we had one, cohesive story that we believed would resonate with our audience. It was helpful to bring in some trial audience members who were also subject matter experts, to get feedback from their fresh perspective. 

Learnings

Secondary research played a big role in this discovery research. I grew an appreciation of secondary research, seeing how when it is curated and presented to an audience to explain or answer questions, it can be just as valuable as primary research. I look forward to using secondary research more effectively in the future as a result of this experience.