Define separate support and operations teams

[choldgraf]

Context

In recent conversations around our support practices, we noted that our support / operations workflows actually entail fairly different skillsets and expectations:

• Support is primarily customer-facing, and is about communication, setting expectations, and coordinating with team members to solve issues.
• Operations is primarily infrastructure-facing, and is about resolving underlying issues that generated the support request.

Currently, we intermingle these two roles with our support steward setup. While the support steward is theoretically just the support contact, because our support stewards are also engineers, they often feel the responsibility to fix things as well.

Proposal

We should define a support role and an operational role with a different set of responsibilities and skillsets. Even if we intend on staffing them with the same group in the immediate future, this will help us understand how to build capacity to fill this roles without asking engineering to do everything.

A few questions to ask for each:

• What kind of responsibilities does each role have?
• What skills and qualities are best-suited for each role?
• How do the two roles interact with each other? (e.g. escalation pathways)
• How do they interact with other parts of 2i2c? (e.g., engineering team, project manager)