To win the Champions League, you will need a team that can deliver the highest quality of football and win game after game without failure. The teams winning usually consist of superstars that are worth hundreds of millions. The people on the bench of the winning team are usually worth more than multiple lower league teams.

This is something to take in consideration if you are doing a Cloud journey and want to deliver the best cloud experience for your company. If you want to be a winner in your market, you will need to have a team that can bring you to the podium.

Roles

The following roles are what most enterprises should aim to fill. You should of course focus on the business goals at the moment and find the people who get you there, but the below list should give you a good overview of a great team that can win you a championship or two.

Business leadership

Leaders with mandate to take decisions from a business perspective.

Cloud lead and program owner

The business management that makes sure that the business requirements are fulfiled.

Budget Holder

Financial management for budget approvals.

Operations

Making sure that the operations of infrastructure and applications are running 24/7 and helping out developers with minor problems that do not need an architectural overview.

Cloud support engineer

First line of support that has regular contact with network engineers, and security engineers and supports infrastructure and OS platforms in Cloud.

Cloud operations

Responsible for availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning. The main focus is on the health of the Cloud infrastructure.

Cloud security engineer

Has the security mindset and specify the security requirements and how to implement them. Manage, monitor and enforces security compliance. Focuses on the security of applications in Cloud, audits and approves the platform and applications and challenges the applications to discover potential vulnerabilities.

Engineering

Creating the cloud platforms and the applications for them.

Cloud architect

Implements Cloud foundational infrastructure and develops it to fit the business applications. Creates templates and and a catalogue of servies/resources that application developers can use.

Cloud application developer

Creates technical designs for applications, code development, deployment and automation.

Groups

The people from the above roles should be part of one or more of the following teams. Some people should probably be part of all of the following groups. Note that the grouping is not siloed, but from a mandate and responsibility point of view.

Cloud Steering Group

Decision making forum which has mandate to approve or deny entry into the cloud.

Cloud Competence Center

Onboarding, platform development, architecture, deployment, management, security and compliance.

Managed Cloud Operations

Handling operations of infrastructure on a large scale.

Finding the people

When it comes to cloud adoption, the biggest challenge isn’t technology – it’s the people and processes that must change and adapt. -Forbes.com

If you look into your current organization you will probably find people who fulfils the roles above - enterprise architects and network engineers. For them to be able to take on the new roles and responsibilities they need to adapt to how the cloud works. This demands a lot from your personnel, especially if they have been in the business a long time.

To setup your new organization for the cloud you will need do a full assessment of your teams.

Your assessment should include technical questions about:

• CI/CD skills
• Utilizing infrastructure as code
• High availability
• Self healing applications and infrastructure
• Scripting skills
• Terminal skills

It is important to rank the questions towards a scale which includes interest in upskilling. A person which is interested in getting the skills in an unknown area is worth a lot when it comes to cloud since one of the main challenges is to keep up with the constant changes and additions. The non-technical skills should include Customer focus, flexibility, responsibility and questions about how they learn.

Upskilling

Having a foundational implementation with first mover applications is essential. Use this opportunity to upskill your personell with learning by doing. Build their experience during the first migrations, take the learnings and do retrospectives. There you will find the gaps that you will need to fill, either by self study or classroom alternatives on the market.

The goal of the personnel should be to gain enough experience to take certifications in their fields that fit their role. The certifications should not be used as validation of their skills, but as a learning experience - the Cloud vendors usually push their most mainstream services as part of the certification questions and there is a lot to learn just by studying for them.

Knowledge sharing

Documenting the results of your first movers and foundational implementation for the rest of your organization will be a first step towards knowledge sharing with the rest of the organization. The three Cloud groups should become advocates for your Journey and evangelise their stories for your organization. Here you will create a figurative book which describes how and why you are doing this change and what benifits that that the rest of the organization will get from it.

When your groups have enough knowledge to be self sufficient, it is time to get young players into the team that can start their training with the more experienced players. Start with those that are interested and let them create a supporter club for your team.

Back to Home