7 The empty toolbox

 

This chapter covers

  • Compounding problems of a lack of automation
  • Leveraging other parts of the organization to build on your automation
  • Prioritizing automation
  • Evaluating the tasks to automate

The focus on products and features that the organization can sell often dominates our minds as technologists. But what many people fail to realize is that the tools you use to build these products and features are just as important. A carpenter without the right tools will always have a piece of wood too long, a nail protruding out, and a corner that just doesn’t look right.

In the world of technology, these imperfections caused by a lack of good tooling are often buried away in a series of small tasks that take too long, are difficult to reproduce, and are error-prone. But no one sees how the sauce is made. No one realizes that the image on the front page of the website has to be resized manually and is prone to being a few pixels off. No one knows that the configuration file reload is done by an engineer connecting to each website and running a command to reload it. And no one knows that out of 50 servers, sometimes a few get missed.

7.1 Why internal tools and automation matter

7.1.1 Improvements made by automation

7.1.2 Business impact to automation

7.2 Why organizations don’t automate more

7.2.1 Setting automation as a cultural priority

7.2.2 Staffing for automation and tooling

7.3 Fixing your cultural automation problems

7.3.1 No manual tasks allowed

7.3.2 Supporting “no” as an answer

7.3.3 The cost of manual work

7.4 Prioritizing automation

7.5 Defining your automation goals

7.5.1 Automation as a requirement in all your tools

7.5.2 Prioritizing automation in your work

7.5.3 Reflecting automation as a priority with your staff

7.5.4 Providing time for training and learning

7.6 Filling the skill-set gap

7.6.1 But if I build it, I own it