The Co-Worker I Like a {Choco}Lot
Portia here: I’ve written before about an amazing colleague I have, and I’m repeating the exercise, interviewing another of my fantastic co-workers and friends, Alain Wyss, about his past experience, what it is that makes him so unflappable, and where he gets all the delicious chocolate he’s constantly bringing into the office (let’s just say that, when we moved offices and had the option to choose new desks, I chose strategically).
Alain has always been one of my favorite colleagues to work with due to his absolute mastery of the Atlassian suite, his ever helpful presence, his spot on sense of humor, and his constant calm. Fun facts about Alain: he speaks Swiss, German, French, and English; he has a great t-shirt collection; there’s always a cat-tail twitching somewhere in the background of the video call when he’s working from home, and he’s seen Apocalyptica live (https://youtu.be/Etns5DS3Txo).
In the discussion below, I’m the bolded interviewer, of course, and Alain is the respondent.
Alain and I spend some time discussing Platform One. If you’re curious about Platform One, check them out here: https://p1.dso.mil/
Alain, what’s your current job title? Do you have any idea?
I think so: I applied to be a Senior Atlassian Administrator at SMT. Is that what I do? Maybe!
If you’re a Senior Atlassian Administrator for our company, what does that mean you actually do?
Well, we talk to the customer, figure out what they want done with the tools (in this case Jira and Confluence), and we either implement it ourselves, or ask Platform One (P1) to do it for us.
So I have a lot of questions about that, and I bet you have a lot of comments. But before we do that…aside from your amazing job here at SMT (obviously), what’s been your favorite job?
I was Head of Messaging Operations at Switzerland’s largest phone company and Internet Service Provider for about 10 years, where I had the technical and operational responsibility for the email system that was used by residential customers and small enterprises and a market share of about 50% within the country. My team and I ran that email system with DevOps principles before there was DevOps, on a private Cloud, before there were Clouds. Not only did I have a great team, but I also feel that by providing email services to so many people I did have a positive impact on many lives.
You’re not easily flustered. Regardless of stress or outside pressures, you’re able to proceed with calm, usually taking the right steps towards problem-solving. What in your past job history or life experience allows you to be so emotionally non-reactive?
The first was a very early job I had doing IT support on the trading floor of a major investment bank right at the moment when stock trading went from “the ring” onto an all-electronic platform. The traders had one or two Unix workstations (Sun and NeXT) that they used to trade stocks and commodities. One of the precious metal traders called for support one day and got me. So I went to his desk, and his system didn’t work. He kept telling me, “bring it back to work! Every minute it doesn’t work, I lose $100,000!” I had to send him away to grab some coffee (and cool down) so he didn’t stand over my shoulder, watching me, pressuring me on every step I did. I needed the calm and quiet to analyze the situation and bring the workstation back to work.
The other one was during the message ops job. At one point, we had a major storage outage, and we were working with the supplier of that storage system to fix it, but it took a while and the outage went into the 2nd day. There was a front page article in the country’s Sunday newspaper, and there was a lot of pressure to fix it, fast, and without any data loss (the data being customer’s emails.) The supplier’s support guys had ideas on how to fix the issue, but they were very non-committal that it would actually work, so once again, I had to take a moment, look at all the information available and take the responsibility of what’s being done to fix the system.
What I learned with all of that is: you have to take a step back, evaluate the bigger picture and plan your steps to get to your target successfully. You need to block out the outside pressure as much as possible, because it’s not helpful in fixing the problem quickly or right.
I see that in your day-to-day operations at SMT: you are emotionally non-reactive while always taking the correct steps to fix a problem.
Yes: right now we’re working with P1, and it can sometimes be frustrating because from our perspective, they don’t always do things as fast as we’d like, or get back to us in a timely manner. The role we have is that we are between our customers and the systems people. We have to ensure that things get done and nobody is angry at the end.
So how did you get involved in Atlassian?
In my previous job, we were replacing the bug tracking system with something new, and the management chose Jira to do that. I happened to be the guy who had the most experience with setting up that kind of stuff.
Oh! So you learned Atlassian from the Australian lady! (Anyone who has learned Jira online knows what Alain and I are talking about!)
(Laughs.) Yes. But also mostly from various documentation, knowledge bases, and most importantly, practice. Once you understand how it works, what you need is practice, practice, practice.
Do you have advice for anyone trying to learn Atlassian systems?
Well, there’s two types of reasons you’d be learning an Atlassian system: as a user, or as an administrator.
As a user, the most important thing is: don’t be afraid to break stuff, because as a user, you cannot.
As an Atlassian admin, go through the training that Atlassian provides, get your own free Jira cloud instance, and just play around. Build prototypes and see what the thing can do.
In terms of Atlassian products–Jira and Confluence–on Platform One, what do you think P1 has done right?
They built the whole system well, with security done right and everything, which must be challenging in the DoD environment, with all the security requirements. Jira and Confluence: they built it; it’s working, and it’s running. But there’s still a little room for improvement, of course!
What are the top 3 improvements you’d make?
- Monitoring. There’s so much to monitor at all times, such as making sure the system is up, available, doesn’t have database corruption, has enough licenses, etc. We can see that the P1 team is reactive to issues with the system that we report. They should be the ones to discover that kind of thing first!
- Communication. It sometimes takes a considerable amount of time for tickets that we put in to be looked at; and even when they have looked at a ticket, there’s periods of time where they don’t respond, sometimes for several days. I understand that there are other priorities that might need their attention first, but nothing is more frustrating to the customer (in this case me), than not getting any information or status updates at all.
- Most importantly, we have customers that have mission critical information in Jira, and P1 needs to acknowledge that and prioritize their resources towards those mission critical pieces accordingly. The system has to be available 24/7, not just during office hours. If something isn’t working, we can’t wait a day or two for them to check it out and get back to us, because it can delay the customer’s mission.
Note: this isn’t the first time personnel at SMT have had similar feedback; check out our fearless leaders on an Atlassian panel during the Atlassian Team Tour here: https://events.atlassian.com/teamtour-government-22/session/737754/panel-agile-service-delivery-in-the-u.s.-space-force?i=pel6ql8_CcgYWWItlb3baIBo2I4rMjth
Last but not least: some people reading this might not know that you’re SMT’s critical source for excellent (Swiss) chocolate. Where does an American have to go to get such good chocolate?
Well (laughs), it’s changed over the years. Now you can get good chocolate in every grocery store in America. Walgreens has good premium chocolates.
And if I went to Switzerland, what should I do and where should I go? And where would I get the best chocolate?
It really depends on your interests. You might want to see the old town of some of the cities. Switzerland has the benefit that they were not bombed during WWII, so the cities are still intact and original. The mountains are beautiful if you want to ski or hike. It’s a beautiful country to visit.
If you want to come back to the United States with chocolate…well, if you go to any supermarket in Switzerland, and you look for chocolate, this is what you find:
My grandpa, when he was alive, was working in a chocolate factory. So this is a hard question for me to answer. I always had the best chocolate as a kid that you can’t buy anywhere, since that stuff was not really for sale other than to bakeries and other places that use chocolate to produce delicious food.
