Thread by @lizthegrey

Next up in track 2: @_a12k on Bootstrapping SRE and starting culture change. #SREcon

USDS, working on Veterans Administration. Combining organic devops teams from multiple applications into one single shared SRE team. #SREcon

Expanded from a few initial national priorities like healthcare.gov to hundreds of applications across a dozen plus agencies. #SREcon

Goals: streamlining appeals processes, managing/discovering benefits online, healthcare applications. No more fillable PDFs that barely work. #SREcon

327,923+ veterans have applied for healthcare online since July 2016. UX studies and working with real customer veterans. #SREcon

Service level objectives. >99.9% availability based on continuous reachability monitoring. 2 minutes a week or less of downtime. [ed: what is the SLI though?] #SREcon

Several different organic teams: caseflow, vets.gov. what if we standardized on same tech stack and combined oncalls? #SREcon

Have a group of people who specialize in tools and best practices. Efficiency gains. Internal goal of changing relationships between developers and ops. Evangelize process to broader VA. #SREcon

The VA is the ultimate large enterprise environment. --@_a12k #SREcon

Environment slide: jenkins, terraform, jenkins, circleci, ansible, k8s, all running on AWS govcloud. Mixture of tech. #SREcon

Socialize SRE concepts through VA organization and have teams rotate into new SRE org to learn. #SREcon

4 Billion (B) dollars of spending on VA? USGov? IT. Top 10 enterprises in the world if appropriations = revenue. #SREcon

[ed: this is looking very familiar -- I give similar advice to start small with one team *then* evangelize rather than smearing SRE mandate across many teams.] #SREcon

Define scope, get the SRE team to work for the initial scope, choose best practices, do engineering/culture work to conform to the chosen practices. #SREcon

Next step: package best practices so they can be consumed by other VA teams. Make them generic and usable as an engagement model. 132 on-premises datacenters in the US to be migrated to public cloud. #SREcon

Inclusion is important. Have people celebrate each others' victories. It empowers people to speak up and share ideas. --@_a12k #SREcon

Cultivate a culture where it's safe to ask questions. Asking questions lets you discover why we do things, and figure out whether there are different choices we could make. #SREcon

Respect different peoples' abilities and skillsets that they bring to the table. USDS is staffed by volunteers from all walks. #SREcon

Implement a *blameless* postmortem culture. Lifted straight from the @srebook. [ed: we didn't invent it, it was jointly invented at same time at other places too e.g. Etsy :)] #SREcon

And celebrate successes, even small ones. use a victories channel to give people party parrots. Reward people for incremental progress. #SREcon

Acknowledge the impostor syndrome. It's real. To work with accomplished and smart people like @mattcutts make you feel like you don't belong. But you do. Remind each other of that. #SREcon

Change is hard, sometimes people are skeptical, but use the USDS values to effect cultural change. #SREcon

Use momentum to your advantage. Build something small that people see works. Build street cred. #SREcon

Be open and share. Show people how you do things. You are there to help. #SREcon

Hire and empower great people. You have to hire people who are very good at their jobs. But not rockstars.

[ed: this leaves open a problem with training. but if you're doing a cultural change, you're training people around you rather than onboarding/training new hires] #SREcon

Find the truth and tell the truth. Point out where processes don't work. Provide examples to drive change. Ask to see "where is the source code?" #SREcon

Go where the work is. There's no substitute to sitting side by side with someone and their processes [ed: if it's a physical presence team. if a digital team, join them in slack!] #SREcon

and finally, @USDS is hiring!! @_a12k makes a strong pitch for serving the US as a citizen by making the government work better [fin] #SREcon