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What to do when your DevOps Team is downsized
By Swiss Himmel
Unfortunately, if it hasn’t already, there’s a potential that your company may have to reduce its size due to a recession or other financial difficulties. This time, technological firms and departments are feeling the effects of the economy. According to one statistic, nearly 145,000 workers were affected by layoffs at more than 900 technology businesses in 2022.
You need a response strategy whether you’re an agile delivery manager, the team leader for a data science project, or the manager of an IT operations function.
Our worries about continuing to be held responsible for the same deadlines and deliverables in the wake of downsizing or budget cuts are captured in a recent Comic Agilé comic strip. That’s just one of several worries the DevOps team members have following layoffs. Others are concerned about expected service levels and skill coverage.
Help teammates feel safe
Your first consideration should be the employees you manage or lead, and how the layoffs are affecting them personally. If friends and confidantes have been let go, some people may be upset, while others may be afraid they may be the next. Your teams and co-workers will likely have unanswered questions, even when leadership communicates reasonably (which is all too frequently not the case).
When layoffs are announced, your first responsibility should be to start a conversation, find out how individuals are feeling, and practise active listening. Developing empathy for personal circumstances, rallying the team around a cause, and praising teammates for even the smallest victories are other ways to ensure that teammates feel protected.
Evaluate your career goals
You should think about your circumstances and how the layoffs will affect you once you’ve taken efforts to speak with, listen to, and reflect with your staff. Have your duties changed, or has the business given you unattainable goals? Do you still feel connected to the mission of your business and the objectives of your teams, or are you questioning them?
Review the product manager’s road maps
Agile teams and organisations affected by layoffs should take action to assess the user story requirements, expectations for minimally viable capabilities, near-term objectives, and road map. When a crucial skill set has been understaffed or there have been significant layoffs, the amount of monitoring should be commensurate to those factors. If layoffs have a 10% impact on the company, it may just be necessary to examine the forthcoming sprints and release commitments; however, if layoffs have a 30% or more impact, it may be necessary to rebuild the road plan.
Larger layoffs should, more crucially, start a conversation about digital transformation plans, customer demands, and product ambitions. Do the initial hypotheses still apply, or are new aims and objectives being discussed strategically because of the current situation?
Evaluate technical priorities
Every IT department has a list of technical objectives and backlogs that they “must do,” “really should do,” and “could do.” It’s possible that the IT strategy also has to be reevaluated, just as you may need to ask the product managers to review their visions and road maps.
Review the following areas:
- Suggest closing down unused legacy systems – When a company is trying to minimise costs, executives could be more willing to shut down less strategic or less necessary systems.
- Take automation and AIops into consideration. These can increase efficiency, particularly in mission-critical sectors where staffing numbers may influence service delivery. Opportunities include infrastructure as code, continuous testing, continuous integration, and IT service automation.
- Rethink service-level goals for teams – Adhere to service-level agreements and best practices for site reliability engineering. For instance, if the number of employees at the IT service desk was cut in half, their incident response times and request fulfilment objectives will likely need to be adjusted.
- Look for ways to lower cloud costs – When a company is expanding, it’s simple for DevOps teams and IT to purchase additional cloud services and leave them running more frequently than is necessary.
- Consolidate platforms and tools with comparable capabilities – This is crucial to examine in IT, where using a common stack and toolkit may increase productivity and lead to a shift in the culture.
Increase learning, documenting, and experimenting
Knowledge loss is one area that is severely damaged by layoffs, particularly when it comes to subject matter expertise related to a business process or specific technological platforms. Tribal knowledge regions, undocumented technology, or support for manual or complicated technological procedures can all pose significant dangers. Data teams frequently discover that undocumented data models and data ops become much more difficult to sustain, and DevOps teams may see a large decline in the expertise of the code.
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