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How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps leaders should focus on fortifying a virtual team culture that fosters an environment for open communication. In a remote and digital world, it's imperative that teams communicate effectively.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

ONLINE-FIRST CULTURE

Our office culture placed a high value on in-person interactions, so office budgets were targeting an inviting atmosphere. During the overnight change to work-from-home, we worried that we'd lose our office culture, so tried to adapt our in-person office culture to online forums. We held video conferences with an effort to create a facsimile experience — but it turns out it was not possible. The online experience works best where there is one voice at a time. We made a mistake in attempting to adapt our in-person office culture, and it's just not fully reproducible. This mistake led to trial and error, and we realized that we couldn't recapture what we had in-person, so instead had to create a new online-first culture. We are still working on this. So far we found ways to balance communication, using tools like company messaging apps and video conferencing. In ways, we now have better company-wide communication. The communication limit of one voice at a time allowed us to condense information into numerical goals, for instance we have breakout general gathering video conversations for general chats.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

TEAM ALIGNMENT

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should onboard a streamlined process that ensures team alignment.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

SET NUMERIC GOALS

We found that focusing on communication using numeric goals and progress towards them helped. Numeric goals are easy to communicate visually (bar graphs) and explain in a short sentence.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

PRIORITIZE AND DELEGATE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should learn how to prioritize and delegate correctly.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL VISIBILITY

The need for cross-organizational visibility is more critical now than ever before. IT teams can often be siloed — and working from home can make that worse. To find gaps in IT operation hand-offs, track productivity (response to tickets, support workloads by operator, development release cycles, etc.) over time to see if there has been a major change (up or down) in workloads and engagement. Examine your teams' workflows and identify places where tools sprawl might be creating delays due to mental switching costs; streamline through integration and/or aggregating monitoring, change and topology data into a single pane of glass. IT Ops teams will have less competing noise, better understanding of the health of their IT Operations and the right tools to help them.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION

Ever since the work-from-home mandates started, ad hoc conversations and resources that were already scattered are often going into a black hole. For many engineers, it's become overwhelming to keep up with all of the communications when working out of the office. To succeed from home, teams need to maintain real-time, aggregated communication streams.
Tina Huang
Founder and CTO, Transposit

High stakes and urgent (synchronous) communication are especially challenging during Covid. I vote that teams invest in automation and monitoring that enables employees to move fast — coordinating asynchronously and with guardrails built in — yet recover quickly when things go wrong.
Mohit Tiwari
CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems

MAINTAIN FEEDBACK LOOP

Knowing that feedback is a key element to the culture of your ITOps teams, it is critical to address the lack of in-person feedback in a remote culture. Creating several, smaller touch points is critical to keeping this feedback loop going without creating more arduous meetings.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

OFFICE HOURS

We have seen success by scheduling 30 minutes near the end of each day for what we call office hours. We publish our office hours to the entire organization and encourage anyone to join. This allows us to be available to the organization for asks that typically come in person, as well as receive more real-time feedback.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

MAKE A CONNECTION

The most prepared IT leaders will develop new programs for engaging staff that may feel disconnected.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

Listen to the AI+ITOPS Podcast with special guest Sean McDermott

Read Windward Consulting's New Report: 2020 COVID-19 IT Economic Impact Study

COLLABORATION TOOLS

As remote work has become a mainstay of doing business, ITOps should work with their company's CTO and CSO to offer the right mix of collaboration tools for employees. Remote work will continue to add stress for employees, and it's the company's job to provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the tools/resources they need to be successful, such as video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, and notification systems. ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of their organization's communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can maintain their productivity levels while working remotely.
Marc Linster
CTO, EDB

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, few enterprises had made the leap forward to remote working. When the pandemic hit, many companies transitioned to a fully remote work environment, accelerating the trend many years ahead in a matter of months. ITOps suddenly needed to fight an uphill battle, supporting a remote workforce of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Setting up the proper infrastructure, in terms of tools and processes, is the number one priority, ensuring that in the short term the company survives and long term that it thrives. New tools must be procured, which inherently are built to support remote collaboration, particularly for mission critical roles such as SREs.
Odysseas Lamtzidis
Developer Relations, Netdata

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps leaders should focus on fortifying a virtual team culture that fosters an environment for open communication. In a remote and digital world, it's imperative that teams communicate effectively.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

ONLINE-FIRST CULTURE

Our office culture placed a high value on in-person interactions, so office budgets were targeting an inviting atmosphere. During the overnight change to work-from-home, we worried that we'd lose our office culture, so tried to adapt our in-person office culture to online forums. We held video conferences with an effort to create a facsimile experience — but it turns out it was not possible. The online experience works best where there is one voice at a time. We made a mistake in attempting to adapt our in-person office culture, and it's just not fully reproducible. This mistake led to trial and error, and we realized that we couldn't recapture what we had in-person, so instead had to create a new online-first culture. We are still working on this. So far we found ways to balance communication, using tools like company messaging apps and video conferencing. In ways, we now have better company-wide communication. The communication limit of one voice at a time allowed us to condense information into numerical goals, for instance we have breakout general gathering video conversations for general chats.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

TEAM ALIGNMENT

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should onboard a streamlined process that ensures team alignment.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

SET NUMERIC GOALS

We found that focusing on communication using numeric goals and progress towards them helped. Numeric goals are easy to communicate visually (bar graphs) and explain in a short sentence.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

PRIORITIZE AND DELEGATE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should learn how to prioritize and delegate correctly.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL VISIBILITY

The need for cross-organizational visibility is more critical now than ever before. IT teams can often be siloed — and working from home can make that worse. To find gaps in IT operation hand-offs, track productivity (response to tickets, support workloads by operator, development release cycles, etc.) over time to see if there has been a major change (up or down) in workloads and engagement. Examine your teams' workflows and identify places where tools sprawl might be creating delays due to mental switching costs; streamline through integration and/or aggregating monitoring, change and topology data into a single pane of glass. IT Ops teams will have less competing noise, better understanding of the health of their IT Operations and the right tools to help them.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION

Ever since the work-from-home mandates started, ad hoc conversations and resources that were already scattered are often going into a black hole. For many engineers, it's become overwhelming to keep up with all of the communications when working out of the office. To succeed from home, teams need to maintain real-time, aggregated communication streams.
Tina Huang
Founder and CTO, Transposit

High stakes and urgent (synchronous) communication are especially challenging during Covid. I vote that teams invest in automation and monitoring that enables employees to move fast — coordinating asynchronously and with guardrails built in — yet recover quickly when things go wrong.
Mohit Tiwari
CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems

MAINTAIN FEEDBACK LOOP

Knowing that feedback is a key element to the culture of your ITOps teams, it is critical to address the lack of in-person feedback in a remote culture. Creating several, smaller touch points is critical to keeping this feedback loop going without creating more arduous meetings.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

OFFICE HOURS

We have seen success by scheduling 30 minutes near the end of each day for what we call office hours. We publish our office hours to the entire organization and encourage anyone to join. This allows us to be available to the organization for asks that typically come in person, as well as receive more real-time feedback.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

MAKE A CONNECTION

The most prepared IT leaders will develop new programs for engaging staff that may feel disconnected.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

Listen to the AI+ITOPS Podcast with special guest Sean McDermott

Read Windward Consulting's New Report: 2020 COVID-19 IT Economic Impact Study

COLLABORATION TOOLS

As remote work has become a mainstay of doing business, ITOps should work with their company's CTO and CSO to offer the right mix of collaboration tools for employees. Remote work will continue to add stress for employees, and it's the company's job to provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the tools/resources they need to be successful, such as video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, and notification systems. ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of their organization's communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can maintain their productivity levels while working remotely.
Marc Linster
CTO, EDB

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, few enterprises had made the leap forward to remote working. When the pandemic hit, many companies transitioned to a fully remote work environment, accelerating the trend many years ahead in a matter of months. ITOps suddenly needed to fight an uphill battle, supporting a remote workforce of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Setting up the proper infrastructure, in terms of tools and processes, is the number one priority, ensuring that in the short term the company survives and long term that it thrives. New tools must be procured, which inherently are built to support remote collaboration, particularly for mission critical roles such as SREs.
Odysseas Lamtzidis
Developer Relations, Netdata

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...