Set your DevOps team goals

The entire team will set goals together.

• Log into Compass and navigate to the CheckOps feature, or prepare an alternative way to track your goals.
• Identify what you want to change or improve about your development or operational practices.

Business requirements can guide your operational objectives:

• Do you need to provide the fastest possible service to your customers, or do you need to be available 24/7/365? Set DevOps goals for latency, throughput, or availability.

Operational objectives can come from the team, too:

• Is your team tired of being woken up at odd hours of the night with alerts and incidents they can't do anything about? Set a goal for minimizing the number of incidents and un-actionable alerts.
• Do you find you’re waiting too long for pull requests to be reviewed? Set an operational objective for how long to keep your pull requests open.

Start with a small number of DevOps goals. Keep it simple, and make sure that you’re collecting the right information to track your progress. If you can, start with the same goal or goals across all of your services - this should make it easier to focus the data your team will review in each meeting.

Ensure your DevOps goals are measurable

Define your goals in a measurable way so you know definitively whether you've met them or not.

• Operational metrics from your services are the way to go here: use an observability tool (for example, Splunk Observability, DataDog, Grafana, etc.) and explicitly describe the metric you want to affect.
• Development metrics for your repositories are also important - you can use Jira Software or Compass to best track these.

As you go through this exercise, you may realize you're not measuring what you actually want to improve. That’s okay! One of the action items for your first CheckOps meeting can be to add the relevant DevOps metric. Once that’s done, you can surface it in future meetings.

Write down your DevOps goals

Once the team is on board with the goals you've set, write them down and share them with everyone - these are your declared operational objectives. Then, set up a foundational Confluence document that’s easily accessible and highly visible and store your DevOps goals there. If you work in Compass, you can set your goals in scorecards.

Your DevOps goals can (and should) change over time. As you gather more information, you'll be able to make more informed decisions about your targets, or you may find that your business or operational objectives evolve. However, be mindful not to add too many goals and DevOps metrics at once, as you might end up diluting the focus of your team and failing to achieve desired outcomes. We recommend a maximum of three goals within a three to sixth month period.

Some examples of goals your team might choose include:

• Increasing your pull request or total cycle time (TCT): useful if your team often misses deadlines.
• Reducing the number of alerts or incidents your team fields each week: useful if your team’s work is disrupted too often.
• Slowing your deployment frequency: useful if your team receives too many incidents.

As your team becomes healthier, you may find the prep phase becomes shorter.