What ITOps Teams Can Learn From Sports Teams

Teams responsible for incident management have so much in common with professional sports teams. Members of both have to be reactive, responsive, strategic and agile! Since they are so similar, let’s explore what our ITOps teams can learn from sports teams.

1. Teamwork

It is no secret that successful teams work together. The members need to communicate efficiently, and adapt to ever changing circumstances in the pursuit of common goals. Thus, a sense of belonging with the team is at the heart of success for not just sports teams, but ITOps teams as well.

2. Communication Strategies

Both on the field and off, sports teams devise several communication strategies to lift each other up, adopt a new game play or simply banter and let loose. Due to the critical and time-sensitive nature of their work, IT Teams need to adopt their own strategies for communication, too! Communication platforms for ITOps teams must be clear, noise-free, and fast. They must be able to keep stakeholders in the loop while making the alerts devoid of clutter. Zenduty integrates its incident management platform seamlessly with your Slack/Microsoft teams to make communication easier. It also allows you to set importance on alerts, so you can get all the important updates without the noise!

3. Healthy teams do better work

You can’t expect injured and exhausted players to win matches. Your engineers are no different. Continuous, long shifts when engineers are on-call all night really take a mental and physical toll. When members are burnt out, their productivity and efficiency takes a hit. They take longer to process incidents. Moreover, burnt out engineers often leave. The cost of hiring replacements and training them is much more than distributing on-call shifts such that they are easier to manage for your engineers.

4. Changing Tactics in Real time

When your opponents change tactics, you have to as well. Teams that keep their play fresh, unpredictable and evolve with their opponents usually fare best. ITOps teams face unknown challenges on their jobs too. New tools, changes and types of errors can throw an on-call engineer off. The trick is to collaborate, adapt and overcome!

Zenduty is a revolutionary incident management platform that allows incidents to be reported, escalated and resolved faster. Sign up for free here.