Platform as a Service

Problem

I was working with a centered team that catered specifically to business areas. We were trying to help the company drive different reporting and data processing aspects but with a limited amount of people on the team. Furthermore, we could only cater to a certain number of high-priority requests at a time. Yet, there was a lot more to be done and there was a strong dependency on us. Nevertheless, things just kept getting delayed and there always seemed to be a bottleneck.

Actions taken

We came up with the solution to create a platform-as-a-service. This would expose the functionalities to APIs and interfaces. Then, we also built tools which allowed the teams to operate independently. For example, they were able to get access to the cluster without actually having to log into the large cluster machines. These types of adjustments opened up the platform so that individuals were more productive - they were able to obtain their own roadmap without having to bring us in the picture all of the time. It also solved our own problems. We were constantly under pressure to deliver an analysis of competing priorities. We were required to discuss which was the better option to build and had continuously not been living up to everybody's expectations. Creating a platform-as-a-service thus relieved this burden of trying to resolve everyone's requests and released the tension of being burnt out all of the time.

Lessons learned

• In the beginning we struggled catering to all of the requests that came to us. The framework we were building, some of the APIs, and the support that we were adding didn't fully support our endeavor. It took some time before the pressure was released.
• This project didn't just alleviate the bottleneck, it also allowed us to start utilizing our own APIs and our own framework to improve our roadmap delivery time, our quote coverage, our QR admission, and eventually our velocity to deliver.