One of the current failures has been that I haven’t been able to provide solutions to my customers on time. This has resulted in some of my customers being unhappy with the work. Further, I have had some issues with deployments failing because of the other side not checking things or problems not being caught on time.

The cause of this is that I am relying too much on intuition and haven’t augmented enough automation to catch the issues. A problem should only occur once, not multiple times. Once a problem has been uncovered, there needs to be a more deep level understanding of the failure so that failure doesn’t arise again.

The reason for this is that not capturing a failure leads to more work, disrupted weekends, etc. If a problem is solved thoroughly the first time then it will not occur a second time. This leads to happier customers, and less overall work and context switching in the future.

Context switching is a major facet of the cause of issues. A problem is always half-solved because there is another customer to deal with. The problem with this is that a problem is never fully resolved. A focus on a single customer at a time to resolve an issue then automating whatever the issue is before going to the next one may be a better use of time.

The last issue is that we do not have a checklist for deployments that we check that ensures that things aren’t breaking in production.

Tasks

• Create a Checklist for Merging Code and Deployments
• Create Automations for Deployments and Ensure Success Over a 10-minute window
• Focus on a single customer at a time