Mindset: Zero Production Issues

When tackling production level issues, you should treat them as though they never should have happened. This means taking them seriously, and ensuring they never will occur again. Using this mentality helps to build quality into your production systems as issues will never become repetitive, no matter how minor they are.

When approaching each problem do not only solve the problem, but think about what you can to do ensure this never happens again.

Perfection Mindset

Customers are unrelenting in their quality expectations of products, all issues should be taken seriously. People who are paying for your product or service expect nothing but perfection. Why not expect the same of your internal services / backend products? Quality in these areas translates to the same level of service to external customers.

Power of the After Action

What you do after a production issue is remediated is the most important part of how you solve the issue. Correcting the root cause that was the issue is where the focus should lie. This is where bulk of the time fixing the issue will be spent. If you are looking to instill a culture of quality for your service or product, this is where the time should be spent to ensure this happens.

Zero Issues Possible?

Having zero production issues is theoretically impossible, however believing in this mindset is. Instilling a culture of "I never want to see this again" and "this never should have happened" is important with every problem you solve. With each problem you solve re-iterate this philosophy across the organization. Add steps to your problem solving workflow to not mark an issue as fully closed when its "fixed". Add a last step in the process to remediate the root cause and correlate to a permanent fix.

Resourcing this Mentality

If your organization is used to quickly solving repetitive issues, switching over to this mindset may be difficult at first. The reason for this is the amount of time and type of resourcing it takes to root cause and fully solve each issue. At first progress on a true solution to issues will feel like it is stalled. You will need to either slow down your process of solving issues or ask for temporary additional resources to be able to handle the increased workload. However, once you have gone through all of your "technical debt" around these kinds of tasks you will find there is less work to be done overall.