Your Team Organization is Just as Important as Your Standards

I've written a lot in this blog about standards and network architecture. One of the key things you can do for your organization's success in addition to good, written standards is a proper team organization split between engineering and operations roles.

If there is one truth in all network team organizations is that there is a clear difference and separation of roles between engineering and operations. Engineering is about providing new solutions to problems. Those solutions may be in the form of single purpose engineering designs, new technologies, design templates, standards, application projects, or lab results. With all of these there is something new being added to the current network environment.

Operations is about maintaining, monitoring, and fixing the current environment. It is not about new things, it's about making the current environment works as best as possible. Operations also goes beyond just outages. It deals with ensuring the network matches current standards, auditing, network management, testing failover, capacity management, and outages.

These two groups have distinct roles. Network Engineers can easily understand what their role is depending on which organization they are in. It leads to efficiencies for both groups. Design engineers can focus on projects and new technologies and not be distracted by operations issues. Operations engineers know they need to keep the network running and do not need to worry about new technologies until there is an official handoff from engineering.

And that brings us to the key communication between the two teams: the handoff. At some point new things need to become part of the real network. To make this happen, there needs to be a handoff from the engineering team to the operations team. This provides operations everything they need to maintain the new technology. Some of the information provided:

• Diagrams
• Configuration standards
• Network management needs
• Security aspects
• Training classes
• Testing results
• Anything else that would help operations manage the new technology

This handoff can happen in different ways depending on the size of your organization. Smaller organizations may have adhoc meetings. Larger organizations may be more process driven with only a documentation handoff. A good way to get the operations team up and running is to make them the implementation team. That way engineering does all the designs and testing, but the operations team actually implements the new technology. That way they get immediate experience with the new technology and can control its release (based on engineering's guidance).

Even if you have a small network team, you should make this split. I have used it at three jobs now and each time it was a success. When I arrived at my current employer, they had the teams split between LAN and WAN. That didn't work. Then they tried core vs. edge, but no one could define what that meant. Then a co-worker and I suggested this engineering and operations split which had worked for us before and it was implemented. That was three and a half years ago and we are still setup that way. In fact, it has worked so well for networking our entire IT infrastructure organization - including storage, hosting, telecom, and security - is now organized this way. It doesn't matter the size of your organization. It works with any size.

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