What can IT Infrastructure teams learn from a coffee shop ?

Perhaps the most important concept infrastructure teams can learn from any shop is the fact that they have clients. In all these years working on the IT industry, this was something that always caught my attention. Most infrastructure teams I worked had no idea that whoever they are providing services to, are in fact, their clients. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there is no direct payment, but trust me when I tell you, if the company is paying you to do something to someone, that someone is your client.

Now that we moved past that, let's think about what it means to have a client. I usually like to run a a simple comparison when I try to explain a new concept. Although not everyone is familiar with how an IT infrastructure team operates, I believe most people had visited a coffee shop or two.

The menu.

In a coffee shop you have clients. This clients all come to your coffee shop, look at the menu, and make an order.

Now think about the menu concept for a second. The menu tells the clients what are the products/services you provide. Some coffee shops will even allow small customizations but rarely a client will order something entirely new.

Going back to the IT infrastructure world this is probably one of the most complicated tricks to do. Create the menu. What are the services you should provide ? Which level of customization your services allow ?

It is normal for the clients to build the most crazy expectations regarding the IT infrastructure team. "Oh, don't worry, the guys in the infra will deal with this". And it is sad because your are never consulted, but only informed about it.

That is why you need a menu. The menu must have a clear state of the services you provide and how they should be consumed. What are the process that the client need to go thru in order to get served. It does not have to be written, but it must be known by all your clients.

If you do not set this clear they will build expectations out of nowhere and will land all those on you. So go get a menu for your team.

The self-service stand.

Observing coffee shops, specially the very small ones, you will notice that they have at least one place where the clients can get stuff like sugar, milk, napkins, forks, knifes, and whatever else the staff detects they could be serving themselves.

They do this because this reduce the number of interruptions and request to the staffs, allowing them to be more available to run more important tasks, like preparing coffee.

An infrastructure team receives on a daily basis many requests that could become an automated process. From application deploy to VM requests, all this can be automated and made available to the clients in a self-service way, i.e. a job in the Jenkins server. Find time to do continuous improvement on your infrastructure and start to automate frequent tasks. Make those available to your clients so they can run it without your interruption.

The line.

Coffee Shops usually operates in a first come, first served model. The client gets in a line, wait to have his order taken, then he goes to the end of the counter and wait for his coffee. It is expected that whoever placed the order first will get served first. This is a very simple process, but it works to maintain the flow of the orders without chaos.

Now imagine if you are waiting for the barista to finish your coffee and all the sudden another client calls the barista and asks him to take his order. You probably will be upset, and might tell the person to wait for his turn.

In a IT infrastructure team this happens all the time. People come in with requests and stay there, waiting for you to start working on his task. You put the previous task on hold and go start this new one. Then someone else pings you on the chat. Tells you that his issue is highly urgent and that must be done right away. You, once more put the previous task on hold and go sort this last one. This is chaos. If you want to be able to ever finish something, create a process and make sure people get awareness over it and follow it. No exceptions. Your process is the line of the coffee shop, you don't give a damn if the guy trying to break the line is a more frequent client or a senator of the republic, you just want him to follow the process and wait for his God damn turn. In the infrastructure it should be the same. Define a process that makes sense for your work flow, make it visible to all your clients. Say no to whoever try to break it. Simple.

Closed to public day.

This one is something I saw a few coffee shops adopt, and I found it quite interesting. They would pick a day of the week, usually the least busy day for doing internal work. Espresso machine maintenance, hard cleaning, replenish stocks, fix small problems. A friend of mine who runs a coffee shop on a very busy commercial area do this on Saturdays. He told me that the sales are slow and the extra effort to keep the store shine and functional attracts more people over the week.

In the IT infrastructure, you need to set some time to do the stuff that is not in your menu, like retrospectives, planning meetings, showcases, and even slack time. Those are important activities and you should find time to do them. Make sure you let people know when you are running those and do it guilty free.

Be happy.

A friend of mine once told me that baristas are very passionate people. They love their work and make other people happy with their coffee make them happy.

This is the most important advice. Be happy on what you are doing. Keep learning with your team. Share knowledge. Find joy on your work and help other people around you to do the same. Good coffee shops always have happy workers. I found that good IT infrastructure teams are just the same.

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