Setting up your team for cloud success

Cloud success depends on the right mindset and team structure.

This includes:

• setting up multidisciplinary teams
• making small, gradual changes through continuous improvement, not big changes
• embracing failure as part of the process
• making risk-based decisions
• making evidence-based decisions
• taking full advantage of cloud automation to focus on user needs

Using multidisciplinary teams

You can set up a multidisciplinary team to design, build and run your cloud-based product. This team owns the whole user experience. It should have the independence to make all decisions about the cloud-based products. Multidisciplinary teams include people with decision-making authority and they are empowered to deliver continuously.

Using continuous improvement

In a multidisciplinary team, everyone works together to deliver and improve your product.

There are different ways to make small, ongoing positive changes to your product.

You can make your cloud-based product more efficient by:

• finding out what your users need
• making changes
• measuring the results
• using evidence to improve that product

If many teams work in this way, it can lead to positive cultural change across the agency.

Create a workplace where your team feels it is safe to fail and to talk about it. This encourages your team to share openly.

Learning from failures

Failure is part of the learning process. You should run blameless reviews and share lessons learned. Encourage people to share:

• what they did
• what happened
• any expectations or assumptions they had

If you understand how it happened, you can avoid doing it again.

Making evidence-based decisions

A multidisciplinary team runs its own cloud-based product. It makes evidence-based decisions about how to meet user needs. Google Analytics and A/B testing help you make evidence-based decisions.

Google Analytics is a tool that helps you collect data about your user’s interactions with a service. You can use these insights to improve your product or service to better meet their needs.

A/B testing helps you improve your user experience. You compare 2 versions of your product or service to find out which is better for your user.

You can use the data from these approaches to improve your products or services. It helps you deliver what your user needs.

This is a change from how agencies traditionally make decisions. People not directly involved may make decisions about a product. They may not know what the user needs are. By using evidence, you can help them make the right decision for your users.

Making risk-based decisions

There is a strong link between the amount of time it takes developers to push code live and the performance of teams.

You have to be able to make quick decisions at the right time. Making decisions slowly isn’t low risk.

When you make a decision, consider the overall risk to your cloud-based product. If you focus too much on a single problem, you could risk the broader security of your product.

Products not projects in the cloud

You should manage your cloud-based product as ongoing, not a project with an end date.

Users expect high-quality reliable services. Self-managing teams can make ongoing changes and experiment to meet their users’ needs. They do this by:

• making changes quickly
• testing those changes with users
• analysing results
• using those results to make further improvements