TL;DR
- Deconstructing identities
- What’s changing
Many of us have been thinking about our identity, reflecting on the joining together of Banno, Bolts, Geezeo, and Internet Solutions over a year ago into a new Digital group. Who are we now and who will we be? We’ve undergone a year of truly massive change, uncertainty, and discovery. You may be reflecting on the past and even starting to dream about what the future may hold for our teams.
As a group of ~600 individuals we’re stretched to the limit trying to maintain close bonds in our new larger community. How do we continue to transform, to innovate, to improve? How can we ensure some measure of independence to allow for progress, while fostering a humble union that moves in step together? We are a complex body of individual parts!
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These are all big picture thoughts and so you may be asking why on earth do you bring this up ginger beard? Well as we’ve been considering these questions in the microcosm of our infrastructure and techops teams we’ve been trying to sort out the practical side of building and transforming ourselves. With such a broad surface area of responsibilities how do we make it easier to enable our teams to focus and scale? Our forms have served us well, but the winds of change are blowing.
The Death of @Ops
As the sound of taps plays in the background we herald the passing of an era. TechOps has been the proving ground for many an intern as well as more established team members. Much to our chagrin we’ve been a bit of a catch all within the Banno organization. The blast radius, if you will, has increased and made it difficult or nearly impossible to stay up with the latest developments in each of our domains of responsibility. Very soon and with great fanfare we will ‘put to pasture’ the #org-tech-ops channel and the @ops group in Slack.
Phoenix
As we ring the death knell for TechOps we are building out a new structure to support the future. However, to do so, we must first lay to rest a handful of common requests from our triage channel in the form of new tools and processes. Firechief being the first, is in it’s initial iteration. The end goal is to use it to track and grant firefighter access automatically rather than rely on someone from @ops to fulfill the request. Following this closely will be Wolfbot for SQL scripts and and the Kill Bbot work to move us closer to a developer driven deployment model. As these major enhancements wrap up we will be able to shutdown #org-tech-ops and move on to the next chapter. This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I’m stepping through the door. I think the sentiment the late great David Bowie was trying to convey in Space Oddity is the sense of stepping into the unknown. That’s where we’re at. None of us have been here before and that’s kind of exciting.
Ground Control
The experience each one of us has with the systems that enable us to even do work is the foundation that our ground control team will be tackling. System integrity and security is one aspect, but a well polished user experience is more than that. Hardware that is performant and platforms that are intuitive help you onboard and retain wonderful people in your team. We want to passionately advocate for the platforms that we use. To be clear the role of an advocate is a very different path than that of support. As an advocate our goal is to partner with our organization to achieve independence and the ability to self-service. To enable and get out of the way.
We are aware that our team would be a poor substitute for Google Search, but we can be complimentary to the efforts of your teams in accessing, adopting and using our major platforms. We will be fielding the common ‘How do I xyz?’ question first with the response of, ‘Who have you asked in your team?’ or with a gentle nudge towards relevant internal documentation. There will be a plethora of resources available on the web for most of the platforms and services we use. If we can point our teams towards learning and development opportunities or identify trailblazers within your teams that have done it or know it already, then we will have succeeded.
Our customer is the entire digital org.
Launch Control
The work and efforts that lead up to a customer’s go-live is where our launch control team will focus. Where our banks and credit unions intersect with technical implementation and the inner workings of the internet is where we excel. We will endeavor to make each and every launch experience as seamless as possible. Being an unanxious prescence in the midst of a nerve racking experience is totally our jam. Attentiveness and communication are our greatest assets as we respond to the technical concerns for each new go-live.
Our customers are the teams that coordinate, implement and support the go-live of Banno Online, Banno Content, and OpenAnywhere.
Evolving Infrastructure
I’ve been working closely with Banno Infrastructure for two years and Internet Solutions infrastructure since January. The breadth and depth of our domains has proven to be a serious hurdle to our own growth. We’ve expanded our Banno infra team only to see it constrict again later. What has become quite clear is that we’ve scaled past the limit of our current structures and previous approach. To be able to position ourselves to support the platform growth and to have any chance of sustaining or attracting staff we have to narrow our focus.
The future state is three infrastructure teams (Dobby, Lakitu, and Pulsar) with different domains of responsibility. Initially still divided between Banno and IS, but further(much futher) down the road supporting one organization with many parts.
Dobby and Pulsar
We’ve identified the first technical domain that will split off from Dobby to Pulsar, a second infrastructure team focused on Banno. Pulsar will be running with the initiatives to kill @ops and assuming ownership of the delivery pipeline. That means Jenkins, GitHub Actions and the overhaul of the approval process. At a future point other technical domains will gradually present themselves to be queued up to move between teams. In the meantime we’ll be filling out our staff levels and improving the transparency of our work. Expect that to look like roadmaps that we begin to share internally that relate to the public roadmaps that our entire organization is using to focus our efforts.
Our customer will be Banno and OpenAnywhere developers and those with a stake in improving deployment pipelines.
Wait a second who’s Dobby…I thought he died? Banno infrastructure has long used the friendly house elf to represent our team and we’re officially changing our name to avoid any confusion now that there will be multiple infrastructure teams.
**Our customer will continue to be Banno and Openanywhere teams"
Lakitu
Within team lakitu we are gearing up at the base of a mountain to begin the epic task of modernizing the infrastructure of NetTeller, ESI, and Treasury Management. We have brought together a team that is eager to tackle the new challenges of Infrastructure as code and strategically moving to Azure. This will take closer engagement with our IS development teams to methodically chart a course forward. This will look tame at first as we simply adopt many of the same tools used in Banno: Slack, Jira, PagerDuty, etc. Then it gets be a bit more radical as our team establishes direction and begins delivering towards the goal of platform modernization.
Our customer will be the IS developers
Starship Infrastructure
This will be a voyage rather than a destination and these are the voyages of the starship Infrastructure. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!