Sources about managing DevOps and operations teams:
Scrum for Operations: Just Add DevOps
Link: http://theagileadmin.com/2014/09/30/scrum-for-operations-just-add-devops/
List of additional excellent articles about agile and DevOps here: http://theagileadmin.com/tag/scrum4ops/
A good article about how to manage a DevOps team using JIRA, taking into account planned project work and unplanned work such as production issues.
- Each SaaS service is a project in JIRA
- High level roadmap managed using a spreadsheet. Each item correlates to an epic in JIRA.
- Every active service is being handled by a team. A team can own and handle multiple services.
- Each team had a Scrum board in JIRA which lists the items for the services it owns.
- Planned work is being managed via JIRA scrum board.
- Planned work is schedule for 40% of the time.
- Unplanned work (such as production issues) – is managed by a separate Kanban board in JIRA which is used for expedited items:
- Only high priority issues to this Kanban board
- Any other item goes to the planned work Scrum board backlog and scheduled appropriately.
- A third agile board is used on the daily standup meetings where it listed all items (planned and unplanned) for all services, with a swimlane for each team member.
Knowledge management:
- Keep a registry of all services, with information about the service, such as architecture, firewall rules, servers, procedures, responsibilities, etc.
- To become a Subject Matter Experts (SME) for a service, the existing SMEs need to sign off that person has the knowledge to become one, to make architecture changes, deploy, troubelshoot etc.
- The rating or experience of a team member (= earning) is measured by how many services he is a SME.
- All of the above is done to discourage a situation where only one person is SME for a service.