Be a Part of the Solution: Be a Hero

Remember the purpose of Production Support? There are several things that we should consider doing, as individuals, in order to accomplish our purpose as a Production Support team:

1. Being flexible. I once knew a Production Support manager who's contention was that Production Support teams are "gatekeepers" of Production. This is a true statement. What wasn't true was his contention that any release that went into Production had to follow the Production Support procedures to a tee and that if the Development team didn't follow them, the Prod Support team should push back and delay the release. Does this meet the goal? The answer is no. Though we all want a perfect world, sometimes we need to be flexible in order to get to the goal. If the business needs a new feature urgently, to take advantage of a market opportunity, is it reasonable to expect them not to make money because Production Support didn't have all the documentation checked off? I don't think so. As with many things, finding the right balance between due diligence and meeting business objectives is an art.
2. Raising our hands. In all companies there are two types of people: those who do and those who don't. You've seen the ones who don't. They have an opinion about everyting in meetings. They're experts at letting you know what shouldn't be done and not what should be done. They're great at telling you that your approach won't work, despite evidence to the contrary. But when it comes time to do the actual work, they vanish. I always encourage Production Support team members to be the doers. All that stuff that no one wants to do, but which is important should be something that we should be willing to do. If our aim is to meet our purpose as a Production Support team: do that break-fix even though your stated SLA says you only do Level 2 Support, manage that special project which really should be done a different group, answer the call when someone asks in a meeting who will do the work and you hear silence. Remember not to argue over who's going to do it, as that takes more time, energy and money sometimes, than actually doing the work.
3. Doing the right thing. Many times it's difficult to do the right thing, especially when the number of issues has been high and you feel mentally and physically fatigued. At times, some of the most rewarding work can come when you push yourself a little and you do those things everyone hates doing. For example: clean up that monitoring system and find a way to remove that false-positive alert instead of just clearing it; create that ticket in the system even though the issue is already fixed; run that report and evaluate trends to make sure that the system won't run into issues. The more disciplined you are at doing those little things everyone hates doing, the easier the work will become for you and your teammates.

So be daring. Be a part of the solution, not the problem. Enable your business. In short, don't be afraid to be a hero.