Change Management in GitLab Support

Decision Making and Change Management in the GitLab Support Leadership Team

The GitLab Support Team may very well be unique among the many teams within the company in that its multiple sub-teams each have the same charter. Making decisions and managing change within this structure come with equally unique challenges not faced by the other teams. Specifically, managers must determine the appropriate scope - whether to act individually or in coordination with the other managers - when they want to make a decision or introduce a process change. And the worldwide support management team must agree that the scoping is correct. We define here our most current processes for determining scope, gathering data and feedback, choosing a path forward, rolling out a change, managing adoption, and reviewing results for future improvements.

We’ll talk about two different types of changes:

1. Process changes
2. Individual assignment and responsibilities changes

Process changes

This process is not limited to the GitLab Support Leadership Team

If you’re looking to roll out a global change (see definition below), you might have been directed to this process. Global changes are commonly but not exclusively handled by the GitLab Support Leadership Team. For that reason, this process is documented within the “Managers” handbook section.

This does not mean the process should only be followed by managers. If you’re having trouble with any part of it, reach out for guidance – either to your manager or to SEs who followed the process before.

Examples of SEs using the process:

• Slack groups per region
• Limit PagerDuty Notifications in #support_self-managed to Triggered Events

Start with a Request for Comments (RFC)

An RFC is a safe space for a lively discussion where all contributors bring their own context and knowledge to determine the pros and cons of potential solutions.

In an RFC everyone contributes equally, regardless of their title.

If you have an idea (or have noticed a problem) but aren’t ready to propose specific changes yet, you can start with the Request for Comments issue template. The template includes guidance on how to make your RFC.

Determining the Scope

One of the most important considerations when looking to make a change is what the scope of the change will be.

Local Change or Global Change?

When thinking about whether a change should be local or global, you might be tempted to focus on the size of the change (number of lines of code changed, number of lines of text in a doc that changed, etc.). But that’s actually a different type of scope that isn’t relevant to this discussion.

Instead, begin with the idea that for the sake of consistency and simplicity, you should lean toward making your change globally unless it doesn’t even make sense for, or apply to, other regions. If you’re considering making the change locally, be sure that you can answer “no” to all of these questions about potential impacts of making a local change:

1. Will it create a meaningful inconsistency with the rest of the global team? Examples:
   1. Your local work products become incompatible with those of the other teams
   2. Terminologies or workflows diverge between your local team and the others, inhibiting collaboration
   3. Other teams can’t work in concert with yours because they don’t have access to new tools and resources yours is using
2. Will customers notice the local change? If so:
   1. Will customers be inconvenienced or even just annoyed by having to work differently in some way with your team than with the other teams?
   2. Will customers’ expectations of “normal” service continue to be met?
   3. Will customers like your change enough to be dissatisfied when other teams or regions don’t do the same thing?
3. Will it create different job descriptions or performance measures between your team and the other regions?

Communicating a Change Proposal

Whether you’re making a local change, based on the decision criteria above, or proposing a global one, it’s important to communicate your plans with the rest of the Support Leadership Team.

Creating a Requested Change Issue and/or MRs

The first step toward making a change is to create a Requested Change issue in the support-team-meta project. Using the linked template (Requested Change), it will ensure you supply the required information (DRI, problem statement, ways to measure success, etc.), helping to speed the process along.

This issue is used for presenting the problem that you are working to solve, for hosting a discussion around that topic, and for documenting the testing phase.

As soon as possible, create the MR(s) to present the actual proposed changes.

Include at least the following in the MRs:

• The decision and the reasoning behind it (such as data and test results that led to the decision)
• Summarize the testing, both what tests were run and what the results were
• Link to the Message Plan Issue
• Add the label ~“Manager Attention” to ensure that the support management team are informed about the proposed change
• As an additional guardrail also add the group @gitlab-com/support/managers to the issue to ensure that the support management team are informed about the proposed change

We use the rollout issue template to get acknowledgement of awareness of a new workflow or process.

NOTE: If there’s any part of the proposed changes that cannot be presented through a MR, place the information in the issue instead.

Communicating a Local Change Proposal

Inform the leadership team as an “inform” item in the agenda for the next leadership sync meeting. Why?

• Someone else might have a suggestion for you
• Someone else might be interested in what you’re doing
• It aligns well with our Transparency value

Communicating a Global Change Proposal

Engage the leadership team in a conversation through your issue and through a full agenda topic in the leadership sync meeting:

• Describe the problem you’re working to solve
• Let the team know if you are the DRI, or are seeking a DRI
• Let the team know whether you’re proposing a solution based on compelling existing data or you’re planning to conduct one or more tests (trials) to determine which solution to propose.
• Add the label ~“Manager Attention” to ensure that the support management team are informed about the proposed change
• As an additional guardrail also add the group @gitlab-com/support/managers to ensure that the support management team are informed about the proposed change
  • If you will be testing, then it’s suggested that you:
    • Present potential solutions and discuss which of them will be tried
    • Discuss any likely impacts of the tests
    • Gain general agreement that you can proceed with your tests
    • If the tests will be large and long running, consider opening an issue for each test and link them all to your issue
  • Otherwise, it’s suggested that you:
    • present data both demonstrating the need for the change and supporting the solution you’ve chosen
    • propose your solution via a Merge Request (linked to your issue) and invite feedback with a reasonable deadline
• Describe how you plan to measure the success of the change (not just the tests)

Constructing a Valuable Test Plan

We make data driven decisions whenever possible. If your proposed change doesn’t have any supporting data, you’ll run one or more localized trials. Be frugal if there is a cost and always be sensitive to disrupting existing workflows:

• If you are not confident or comfortable designing a test, work with other managers to flesh out ideas.
• Keep in mind that there’s a difference between the scope (local or global) of a change and the scope of a test. A global change most likely will not require a global test.
• Run the tests just long enough to get the data you need
• Involve only as many people, teams and regions as you need to make the tests legitimate
• If a test in the production environment would be problematic, look for a way to run it in a sandbox instead
• If running more than one trial:
  • try to run them in parallel with each other to save time
  • limit your testing to the two or three most likely potential solutions

Standard Timelines

For future iterations:

1. Do we want to have standard timelines for certain steps in a rollout?

   • Initial discussion length
   • Days from rollout start to adoption complete

2. Do we want to weigh the impact of changes to ensure that we aren’t changing too many complex things at once?

Rolling Out a Change

Roles in Change Management

During the rollout, use these terms and their provided descriptions to communicate clearly about the different roles people can play in the change process.

Role	Description
Champion	Person who will advocate for the change due to their strong interest in, and possible responsibility for, the success of the change. Most of the time champions are managers.
User	Person who uses the processes, documents and resources that are being changed.
Impacted Non-User	Person who is not an actual user of the processes, documents and resources that are being changed, yet who will experience changes in the behaviors of the users. E.g. Support Engineers may notice managers responding differently to escalations, though they themselves do not need to do anything new.

The Process Change Rollout Plan

When it’s time at last to make the change, create a Process Change Rollout Plan issue. The process change rollout plan template contains instructions to guide you through filling in all the appropriate details. And the issue itself then describes your full action plan.

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Individual assignment and responsibilities changes

These types of changes are almost always local and small. An example:

• Changing the workload balance of an SE to have them spend more time sharing knowledge and less time taking tickets

The motivation for these changes could come from a need to manage individual performance and development, balance resources, improve expertise distribution, or address other similar items.

Although planning of such a change tends to occur outside of issues (for confidentiality reasons), and to be conducted between managers and directors, if it will impact people other than those directly involved, consider taking one or more of the following actions before making the change:

1. Explain your plan and ask for concerns and questions in your region’s next managers’ sync.
2. Host two separate cross-regional meetings, one with each of the regions other than your own, to explain your plan and ask for concerns and questions.