The information below relates to personas developed for the use of the Modularity working group. These personas will be continually updated as more information is gathered from existing users that fit these roles. Also, any information provided by community members or working group team members will be incorporated as well.
Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might interact with a product in different ways. They are not market segments but should be thought of as user archetypes.
Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires and limitations of users in order to guide decisions about the product. They should be based on user research and should by 1-2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes and environment details.
There should be a primary persona defined along with secondary personas. More than one can be primary, but no more than 3 in order to keep the team focused in their design and implementation work.
Common benefits include:
The following have been identified as the first set of personas:
Background
Primary Goals
Background
Primary Goals
TBD
Aligns IT initiatives with business goals
Quote
“In this competitive market, we need to be fast, efficient, and use technologies that attract developers to the company.”
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
Manages team that oversees infrastructure components
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
Stan starts his day before arriving in the office by checking email and making note of any issues that have arisen over night. Anything that needs his immediate attention can be handled through email and requests to others to get started on solutions. After getting to the office, he touch base with his manager to make sure we are in sync for the day. Then he has a quick meeting with his team to make sure they know the goals and issues to be addressed that have come up over night. Most of the rest of his day is spent putting out fires, dealing with email and sitting in project meetings.
Identifies the need for changing how the company works
Quote
“In my job I need to be a master multi-tasker. I love that there is constant change and that every day is different.”
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
Karen starts her day by checking email and reading the latest articles from her feeds. Ideally, she can spend a few hours in the morning going through industry trend documents and identifying potential items that can be leveraged. Most days however, get full of stakeholder meetings and project meetings where she helps to keep things on track and making sure the business objectives are still going to be achieved.
In the afternoon, her goals are to write up proposal and plans. She also prefers to spend at least one hour looking through the data to support upcoming proposals and making sure that they still make sense for the business.
Ensure current IT infrastructure works seamlessly
Quote
“What people don’t realize is that being an System Administrator is a 24/7 job. There is a constant stream of emails with requests and issues from all fronts and you really have to know how to prioritize and triage effectively to be successful at this job. It is definitely not for everyone, but I enjoy the pace and the constant challenge.”
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
Yvonne starts her day by checking email before she even gets out of bed to make sure there were no failures overnight and there are no fires that can’t wait until she gets to the office. Once satisfied that all is well, she gets ready, takes care of her family and heads into the office. Upon arriving at the office, she makes a pot of coffee and again checks her email. Her priorities include correcting any issues that are stopping others from working and escalating anything that she cannot work on herself. Yvonne then checks in with her supervisor on the day’s activities, checks on any hardware deliveries and communicates with co-workers on overall system status.
Links the business mission, strategy and processes to the IT strategy
Quote
“I love my job...I am one of a few who get to work strategically with Leadership and still maintain a technological connection to the product. Exploring new technologies and innovations and figuring out how our product can benefit is one of my favorite aspects of the job. It can be very stressful and demanding, but that is how I know I am making a difference to my team, product and company.”
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
Kevin starts his day by catching up on his feeds related to security, serviceability and other industry trends to make sure he is aware of new ideas. He then has his daily standups with the dev teams and meets one on one with team members that have issues or that he needs to ask questions of.
Kevin spends the majority of his afternoon documenting the roadmap and evaluating options to determine if they meet feature requests/needs and how they fit into his strategies to meet enterprise compliance. Once a week, he meets with Senior Leadership to report on progress as well as identify any recommended changes to direction that he has. If leadership has issues with his recommendations, he needs to wrap back around and come up with other alternatives or bolster his arguments for proceeding with his original recommendation.
Design and implement code
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
When Rajiv gets to the office he spends a few minutes catching up on his feeds and checking email. Then he participates in his team’s standup meeting and sets up some time with a coworker who he needs help from to complete his story. Until he can meet with him, Rajiv works on fixing bugs that have been found. Late morning, Rajiv has two project meetings to attend and then has his quick meeting to unblock his story.
After lunch, Rajiv finishes his story and starts on the next one in his backlog. Usually there are additional bugs that get filed throughout the afternoon so he reserves the last hour and half to work on those before heading home.
Continuous integration/Continuous delivery
Quote
“Some folks think I’m a sys admin, others think I’m a coder. The truth is, I’m both and a lot more!”
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
Devin starts his workday by checking on the status of the overnight builds. One build failed miserably, so his first order of business is to find out why. After he figures out which component appeared to cause the problem, he opens a Severity 1 ticket on that component so the responsible developer will be notified immediately. Devin gets an automated out-of-office notification from that developer, so he has to inspect and fix the code himself, and then kick-off the test of the build again.
Because of the unexpected issue, Devin arrives late to the weekly DevOps meeting with his team of developers, quality engineers, and product managers. The main topic is the decreasing availability and performance of the deployment system, so they need to plan for a more scalable and performant solution. After this, he completes his daily status report about the CI/CD pipeline to the engineering management team. Once that is sent, Devin, intermittently coordinates work among his team members in between the moments he gets to modify the scripts that orchestrate the complete deployment of development, QA, and production environments.
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
Design and Implement Code
Primary Goals
Pain Points
Primary Goals
Pain Points
Primary Goals
Pain Points
Management of the Operations Team
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
The first order of business for Isaac is to review the reports of system operations from the previous day. He’s especially interested in the availability numbers because a big software upgrade was applied to a few servers overnight. Fortunately, system availability was not affected, and the upgrade should improve the numbers for system response time, so it was a win-win for customers and Isaac, who constantly keeps his eye on the SLA commitments.
Afterwards, Isaac attends a meeting with his staff to discuss the exit strategy plan for a customer who will be leaving their service at the end of the month. A smooth transition is a must.
Isaac then has a series of meetings with the technical leads on his staff to discuss proposals for rolling out new server hardware during the next quarter. He needs to balance capacity and performance with the tight budget he’s been given for expansion, so he needs lots of details so he can evaluate and select from the multiple options on the table.
Customer and industry liaison to the product and the company
Quote
“A lot of my time is spent gathering resources, coordinating various teams to agree on decisions or work to achieve customer goals. I need to spend more time distilling down ideas and driving agreement across disparate teams. My role is about working with other to build the grand plan. Improving communication, clarity on commitment and direction, would result in more timely decision making.”
Background
Primary Goals
Pain Points
A Day in the Life
Pablo begins his day by checking his calendar, sees what meetings he has today. Next he reviews emails and follows up on any IMs that he may not have responded to. If any fires have occurred overnight, Pablo will jump on resolving issues or unblocking progress. He gets on a couple of customer calls and works to either gain insights or resolve issues with the customer. His day is full of meetings with co-workers, executives and conversations with customers. He is always working to coordinate and manage the products across teams and throughout the company, as well as with the customer base. This also means that Pablo occasionally touches base with some of the Sales and Customer Experience teams. He occasionally goes on site to visit customers + partners. He typically makes rounds with Development + Project Management to assure that everything is on track. Pablo says that his role requires him to wear many hats. He considers his role part visionary, traffic coordinator, technologist and communicator. “I love my job, it energizes and exhausts me, all at the same time! Have more data to provide insights and guidance would give me more time to focus on gaining deeper insights into customer + market needs, rather than focusing on if the work is going to get done.”