 Oh, today I'm talking about minimum viable run books. The idea that you could use collaboration, automation to improve your process. So I had to ask a deep question, who am I? I'm a native, I love craft beer, love to cook, love to pay people to cook for me, expecting a baby boy in August and I work at VictorOps. So what is the topic for today and why I chose it? So it's a blend of the dev process of minimum viable product which is a process to iteratively improve as well as instant run books and kind of blending the two together into a single practice. So why, what's the purpose of it, right? It supports your team members, it mitigates confusion, reduces delays and also helps you continuously improve, but when we talk to a lot of organizations, they don't do it whatsoever. If anything, they barely have it. So when an incident occurs, it's like, oh my gosh, what the heck, what the heck is going on? What's the format? Where's the firewall? Why is this failing? What's the fix? Who's Tina Fey? And it's pandemonium all the time. So the idea is that you want to provide them with something to work with here. So you want to get started and just get focused on run books and building them out. And then this is really just to keep in mind that your start and your finish is always the same, right? You always pick up where you left off, where that last incident occurs. The idea is to just start and continue to go. So the first step is to gather all that tribal knowledge. All your dev guys, all your ops guys are insanely smart and all that stuff is turning in their minds. You're trying to rip that knowledge and get them to throw it up and put it into somewhere where we can capture it digitally. So you have Slack, you have HipChat, you have email going back and forth, anything that's text rule that allows you to copy it and at least put it somewhere. So that way you have that, what you would call a minimum viable run book in place. And once you have that collaboration, you want to convert it into action items. So yes, they may have checked the host number. So turn it into an action. Where's the service? Is Tom online? Convert it into an action item to where you can have it be something ready to go. And keep in mind about what it looks like. Always have the who is involved, what they're supposed to be doing, where should I be looking and how do I go about resolving this incident when it hits me. And be sure to put it and wrap it up in a place where it is easy to access. So what does that look like? A URL. Put it in a wiki. Call that collaboration. That's converted into actions into a link that you can send out and share. And remember, although it says run books, we want to keep away from heavy documentation. We want to keep it as lightweight as possible. And once you get it, just ship it already, right? Just send it. Send it on its way. Let it do its job. Even though it feels a little archaic, it beats having absolutely nothing in place and just let the URL do its job. So how do you let the URL kind of get there when you need it most? You got to not let it sit in the corner and put it to work. So you want to get these URLs displayed right when the alert occurs, whether it's a platform that does it for you, a webhook to an email whenever the alert hits, just having this mindset of if this alert, then this run book. And then get feedback, right? Keeping it iterative. Best way to get feedback? Ask for directions. Am I going the right way? No, you idiot. Go left. And then you just adjust accordingly. And then what that allows you to do is once you've adjusted, it starts to open up areas where you haven't really thought of yet and you can gather that feedback and new ideas of how to improve this run book process. So once you've already got to the point where you've adjusted the first time, just continue to do it over and over again. And understand that you will continue to iterate and reach a point where even though you have some shippable and packaged object or product or piece of value, just know that even when you think it's done, you're still sending it through that iterative process again to get it going and continuing to improve. So just keep in mind when it comes to run books, having something is absolutely better than having nothing because keep in mind that people are waking up in the middle of the night managing these alerts. So even having just a text thread, something archaic beats absolutely having nothing. So as a recap, you got super smart people. They're already collaborating. They're already doing stuff. Gather all that knowledge, convert it into some actionable items. Once you take those actionable items, put them on to wikis as a central repository if you will. Send those wikis out or send those URLs out as those alerts hit. Be sure to always be open and gathering the feedback is what you're going for and then bringing it back and improving those wikis every single time it hits. That way you know what you're doing. You won't be blocked anymore, why things are failing, what the fixes are and whether or not Tina Fey should be fixing your network or not.