Tell me the last time you prepared for something; because you prepared, it was succesful

Situation:

• In the past, before I was team lead, everytime there is a on-call issue/alert, the engineer will have to find a solution from scratch
• they would need to find a solution on the spot
• this slowed down the response time

Task:

• My goal was to make on-call process seamless
• I wanted to have a lower resolve time

Action:

• Much like a POH (pilot operating handbook), where pilot use when there are incidents on the plane, I decided to create my team's on-call handbook. I called it the SRE7 Operating HandBook
• Here I documented most procedures to take when there's a fire
• New a new incident happens, the on-call person usually updates the handbook
• Also, during our post-mortem, I make sure that the book is updated

Result:

• As a result, people were not inimidated to be on-call
• I also managed to lower our response time as a team

Lesson:

• We have to constantly find ways to improve our existing system