Offsite meetings can be great for getting things done. Being out of the office can clear the cobwebs, break down barriers, and lead to real breakthroughs. At BigPanda, the marketing team has started experimenting with how we run offsites, with the aim of trying to find a “secret sauce” that leads to success – maximizing both team building and task execution that we tackle in our offsites.
IT Ops and DevOps teams in every organization are capable of focusing on revenue-generating initiatives and projects. Unfortunately they’re held back by constant fire-fighting…which means they are reduced to supporting just the current state and existing/legacy applications and services.
IT operations teams have some of the most stressful jobs in IT. Keeping data centers online, servers running, enterprise systems functioning, and applications performing — all while responding to incidents and requests is hard work. While there are monitoring systems in place to provide visibility and change management practices give IT some control over the network and environment, IT operations teams constantly feel like they are fighting a losing battle.
Few things damage productivity as much as waiting. The act of waiting forces us to context switch, disrupts our creative momentum, and eliminates our ability to experiment. Whether we are deploying a new service or troubleshooting a problem, waiting puts a heavy tax on team productivity in IT Operations.
If you’re part of a large enterprise, you’re probably in the throes of digital transformation. If you’re in IT, you’re supporting your business by rolling out new services and apps weekly (or even daily). Meanwhile, your users expect 24×7 availability and performance. So your IT operations team is having to sift through ever-increasing data pouring out of myriad specialized and fragmented monitoring tools, hybrid clouds, legacy systems and virtual infrastructure.
