Pay down tech debt and complete migrations & upgrades faster with OpsLevel Campaigns

Kicking off a Kubernetes migration? Moving from cron jobs to a data orchestratror? Locking down your software supply chain? Or maybe all three?

Whether paying down technical debt, upgrading a library version, or staying on top of security and compliance, engineering managers and directors have a lot to coordinate:

• Identify the impacted teams and services
• Define the technical goals and actions required to get there
• Brief those teams and lay out a project plan – with details and timelines
• Track progress and remind teams of approaching deadlines or changes in scope
• Report on statuses and outcomes to senior leadership

Migrations & Upgrades & Tech Debt, Oh My!

These different pieces of work have traditionally been spread across multiple tools or spreadsheets. Inefficient at best. Tedious at worst.

For especially high-profile or unwieldy projects, a dedicated resource, like a Technical Program Manager (TPM), might be tasked with coordinating all the moving pieces–workstreams, tooling, reporting, etc.

But TPMs are scarce resources, and using them for these sorts of projects is not scalable.

Campaign to Win

Campaigns is a set of capabilities for planning, running, and reporting on engineering initiatives.

With Campaigns, engineering management can complete more of their mission-critical initiatives.

How? OpsLevel already holds context about your services and teams. Adding Campaigns provides a scalable, one-stop shop for operationalizing that information.

Instead of cobbling together a project plan based on long email chains, one-off queries, and spreadsheets, use OpsLevel.

And all that time saved? Spend it on your backlog. Use it to cross more objectives off your list of quarterly or annual goals.

Campaign Components

For a detailed rundown of how to configure a campaign, please see our documentation here.

Project Brief

Each Campaign has a dedicated dashboard or hub where the owner (e.g. a TPM or SRE) defines and maps out the initiative’s scope and timeline.

This includes a Project Brief, which is useful for documenting the business goals and motivations behind a project.

Checks & Filters

Campaigns are built on top of two of OpsLevel’s existing primitives–checks and filters.

Each campaign must include at least one check, but can include as many as ten. Many different check types exist in OpsLevel, but they all can be boiled down to: things you want to be true about your services.

Campaigns are also typically filtered to a subset of relevant services. For example, if you’re driving a Ruby upgrade, your campaign would use a filter to only target Ruby services.

Notifications

In addition to dedicated tabs (for service owners) and dashboards (for campaign owners) for highlighting Campaigns, we’ve also introduced ad-hoc Slack and email notifications that can be triggered from OpsLevel at any time.

Campaign owners can use the notifications, which are only sent to teams that have not completed all the Campaign’s checks, for simple deadline reminders or for pushing out any custom message.

Burn Up Chart

With our new burn up chart in Campaigns, it’s easy to follow both how many services are currently in scope for a campaign and how many services have, to date, completed all the necessary checks. The approaching deadline is easy to see as well.

Summary & Reporting

When a campaign is completed, the owner can choose to promote any of the campaign checks to their Service Maturity rubric in order to monitor for any future backslide or drift and ensure new services meet all the necessary standards.

Completed campaigns are no longer promoted to service owners, but the outcomes and historical burn up chart are always available for review.

Go Forth & Conquer

We know that most engineering organizations have important projects that are stuck in their backlog.

That’s why we built Campaigns–to increase the throughput of your organization and move more initiatives to the Closed column. Ready to launch your first campaign? Request your OpsLevel demo today.