In my experience, there are three major sources of work for an opsy team:
- Keeping the lights on – updates, maintenance, keeping entropy at bay. You can barely control how much of this there is, however you can control how much work it is to deal with through
- Work to improve your own situation: automating stuff, architecting better systems, evolving processes, getting dev teams to do something in more ops friendly ways. Both of these compete for focus with
- Support work, that is helping product teams in all the things they need to build product. This is almost always interrupt-driven, you can try to get wind of these needs ahead of time but if you insist on exact requests in time for your own sprint planning, you're instantly at least doubling the lead time on everything.
Things I have seen work to deal with this:
- At an appropriate granularity of organization (by default, per team), designate a rotating first responder. This is the person who takes in short term requests on whatever communications ch