Enablement Sub-department

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5. Enablement Sub-department

Maintained by:

Chun Du

@cdu1

On this page

• Vision
• Mission
• Fiscal Year 2021 Direction
• Sub-department Members
• All Team Members
  • Database
  • Distribution
  • Geo
  • Memory
  • Global Search
• Business Continuity - Coverage and Escalation
• Stable Counterparts
• How We Work
• Software Subscriptions
• Common Links

Vision

Offer enterprise-grade operational experience of GitLab products from streamlined deployment and maintenance, disaster recovery, secure search and discoverability, to high availability, scalability, and performance.

Mission

Enablement focuses on improving our capabilities and metrics in the following areas:

• Database
• Distribution
• Geo
• Memory
• Global Search

Fiscal Year 2021 Direction

• Grow feature maturity to improve enterprise experience and readiness
• Build and enhance features and integrations to increase market penetration
• Solidify foundation for smooth operations and high availability to continue to scale and improve our SaaS offering

Sub-department Members

The following people are permanent members of the Enablement Sub-department:

All Team Members

The following people are permanent members of teams that belong to the Enablement Sub-department:

Database

Distribution

Geo

Memory

Global Search

Business Continuity - Coverage and Escalation

The following table shows who will provide cover if one or more of the Enablement Engineering management team are unable to work for any reason.

If an Engineer is unavailable the person providing Issues/MRs coverage will reassign open issues and merge requests to another engineer, preferably in the same group.

Some people management functions may require escalation or delegation, such as BambooHR and Expensify.

This can be used as the basis for a BCP Communication Plan and Role Assignments, as well as a general guide to Enablement Engineering continuity in the event of one or more team members being unavailable for any reason.

Stable Counterparts

The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:

How We Work

• Apply budget for professional development
• Integrated Team (Pilot Program)
  • The Enablement Sub-department is experimenting Integrated Team model where both Frontend and Backend Engineers report to a single Engineering Manager and work in an integral team, which is different from many other sub-departments. The frontend work of Enablement teams are relatively light compared to other sub-departments, as a result the ratio of BE:FE is 12:1 by the end of FY2020, and the projected ratio of FY2021 is even higher. After taking many factors into consideration (see discussions), Enablement Sub-department will continue experimenting the Integrated Team model for operational efficiency.
• Tracking Spikes and Operational Efforts
  • Enablement teams generally work at a lower level in the tech stack than other development teams. More effort is directed towards spikes and operational work and is not captured in MR throughput metrics. Examples include setting up and monitoring Geo on staging or working with infrastructure to roll out advanced global search. To better capture these efforts, teams are encouraged to label relevant issues as ~Enablement:Tracking and add an issue weight equal to the estimated number of person-days spent. We will track these issues along with throughput metrics in the Enablement dashboard. It is still important to apply our iteration value to these issues and break them down into the smallest possible amounts of work.

Software Subscriptions

The Enablement teams leverage the following software or SaaS services to deliver our products. For general information of procurement, checkout the procurement team page. For procurement questions, bring to #procurement. To make new Purchase Order (PO), create a new procurement issue and select the software-vendor-contract-request template.

Common Links

• Issue Boards
  • Database Milestone Board
  • Distribution - Deliverable Board
  • Geo Kanban Board - note that Geo makes a board for every release.
  • Memory Milestone Board
  • Global Search Milestone Board
• Slack Channels
  • Enablement Sub-department #s_enablement
  • Database team #g_database
  • Distribution team #g_distribution
  • Geo team #g_geo
  • Geo standup #geo-standup
  • Memory team #g_memory
  • Global Search team #g_global_search