Management of an infrastructure team

Question

My team is responsible for a specific type of database infrastructure in our large organization.

The team's work can be roughly divided into three categories:

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Internal projects

This is work aimed at improving our systems, making the team's work or management easier, developing applications, tools and automations, reducing amount of problems in production infrastructure, etc. This category mostly consists of projects which would take a single person between two weeks and several months to complete.

Application projects

Designing and building an infrastructure for a client inside the organization. Working closely with the client, understanding their needs and designing a suitable database infrastructure. This kind of work can also take a single person between two weeks and several months.

Incoming day-to-day events

Unplanned requirements from the team. This includes unexpected faults in production, requests for small changes in a production database, etc.

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I would like the emphasis in the team to be on the first category - internal projects, because I believe that most of the pain in production and everyday work will be gone as a result of this work. And so, I would like us to be able to work consistently and effectively on such projects.

At the same time, we have to satisfy incoming requirements and long-running client projects.

Advice and thoughts on a suitable management framework for my team, and how it would be implemented would be welcome.

Answer 1

From what I understand of the text, you want to know how to juggle the 3 different types of work for one team. This happens in a lot of companies and can be hard to deal with.

I think this is all about balance: Even though you think the internal projects are more important, the others are customer facing. Customer facing ones usually equal "earning money", internal projects usually mean saving money after investing a lot of money (salary / training / hardware). This is why companies usually choose to skip the first and blame you when there are issues.

To make the internal projects more appealing for the business, explain what will happen if the maintenance on the systems is not done and how that would affect business. E.g. if we do not scale up the machines, queries for customers will take longer to complete and take up more system resources. This will cause a system outage when not addressed.

By explaining cause and effect there should be an understanding with management to spend time on it.