What does it look like to work with our team of Cloud Infrastructure Experts and how can we bring what we do best to help bring out the best in what you do? The following lays out our typical process in taking on and working with new clients, such as yourself.
Of course, every client and every process has its own unique approach, so the best way to know what to expect is to reach out today.
Let’s start a conversation on what we can do for you!
Getting Started
Finding The Right Fit
There are no strings attached when it comes to engaging with us - we want to talk.
We want to understand what your challenges are, for you to know where our expertise lies, how we can help you, or how we can guide you in the right direction.
Introductions
Let’s get to know each other and learn more about what you’re looking to achieve. If you’re not already aware, we can also explain a little more about who we are and how we operate.
At our core, we are a team of problem solvers - it’s what gets us up every morning. We want to learn more about your goals at a high-level and delve into what challenges need to be overcome to achieve those goals. This helps us determine fit within our area of expertise, gives us insight into how your goals can be achieved and helps us recommend alternative courses of action for you if it is not within our focus.
If we find we are aligned, then we move on to the technical call.
Technical Call
Let’s explore some of your solution requirements, bringing both of our technical teams to the table.
At this stage we can lay out exactly what you want with our team; if you’re not sure of what you want then we’re more than happy to provide guidance and recommendations on the correct approach.
Whatever we discuss during this call won’t be set in stone but it will provide a good foundation for us to present a plan to you in the proposal step. We may also have a few follow-up questions for you based on our discussions or ask for some simple access to “take a look under the hood” if needed.
Proposal
What it all boils down to in this phase is - are we able to provide a solution for you that meets both your technical and budgetary requirements?
We know that both are incredibly important, so in our proposal we take great care to make clear::
The scope
Our assumptions and any risks we foresee
The all important plan
Timelines, effort and pricing
This is essential for you to make a clear and informed decision. And don’t worry, we know that this can be an iterative process and can involve a few conversations - if there are any questions you might have, or changes that you wish to see, we are glad to discuss and make adjustments to get to what you’re looking for.
Acceptance
Once you are satisfied with the proposal, we are confident that you will be more than satisfied with the outcomes.
In this step we’ll formalize the plan, attach the legal information, and then return to you to review and sign. Following this we will move on to onboarding.
Onboarding
We’re ready to start executing your project plan, overcome your challenges and achieve your goals, let’s go!
But how do projects work with us? Good question, as we become a complement to your team, we know that open, consistent and reliable communication makes the team work. As such, we start with the following:
Slack
The vast majority of communication between your team and ours will be via Slack - whether that's Q&A, status updates, or just jumping on a quick call. As soon as you’ve accepted our proposal, we’ll send you an invite to a shared channel where you’ll meet your TAM...
TAM
What’s a TAM? Your Technical Account Manager (TAM). The TAM will lead both account and project management functions; a key figure in helping to further define requirements and priorities as well as making sure that we’re meeting your expectations. Your TAM will help arrange our next important step - the kickoff.
Kickoff
What would a project be without a kickoff meeting? Introductions, defining key people, escalations, gaining access are all discussed here to help set the tone and get us off on the right foot for a successful engagement.
So What Next?
Whether it is the completion of this project or beyond, you may also be wondering what else the great minds at stack.io can do to augment your team.
Augmenting Your Team
We know it’s hard to hire great DevOps engineers but why opt to hire one, two, or even a team when you could benefit from the skillset of numerous engineers at stack.io? In-house knowledge is a huge asset but so is clearing out your backlog, maintaining your infrastructure, and doing it all in good time. That’s why we have our DevOps On Demand offering - you could also call it pay-as-you-go DevOps.
How Does It Work?
We treat every project that you raise as exactly that, a project.
It gets scoped out by our team
We provide you with an estimate and timeline
We await your approval
Then we get to work where it slots into our cycle
A Cycle You Say?
Like any good DevOps team, we like to plan. We work in one-week long sprint cycles to fill our workload with customer projects that we are confident we’ll be able to execute in that timeframe.
Of course, there may be long running projects that might take up multiple sprints. There might even be a project that you need performing that just can’t wait until our next sprint.
We’ve come across all different kinds of cases and we’re flexible enough to help accommodate your needs.
Projects vs. SRE Tasks
Let’s take a look at some helpful definitions and where they would slot into our cycle:
Projects: We consider a project to be a task that doesn’t have an immediate urgency but it’s still obviously very important to you and your team. We schedule these into our sprint cycles where we have availability.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Tasks: These would be tasks that are necessary for you to be able to perform your day-to-day operations, and waiting until the next sprint cycle is simply not possible. Heck - you would even contemplate doing it yourself if that was the case. We certainly don’t want to be a roadblock, so just let us know if something is holding you back.
Wait Time?
We know that wait time can be a concern when it comes to working with contracted services.
Rest assured that our sprint and staffing procedures allow us to go with the flow, if there’s more work that needs to be done, then we add more engineers to the sprint cycle - simple. You want to clear out your backlog, we want to help you get there.