A Fresh Look at Operational Debt

Explore a fresh perspective on operational debt in this 16-minute conference talk from SREcon22 Americas. Delve into a structured model that converges two viewpoints on operational debt, focusing on process gaps and risk. Learn how to define operational debt as work required to address process gaps that pose risks to business operations. Gain insights on prioritizing operational debt using a risk/reward approach, creating backlogs for collaboration with engineering managers, and comparing it to financial and technical debt. Examine Fowler's quadrants in the context of operational debt and investigate the relationship between debt and toil. Discover practical applications for backlogs, toil reduction, and addressing unknown unknowns in SRE practices.

Intro
Technical debt is insufficient
I'm thinking about
Examples
Operational debt characteristics
Runbooks
Prior definitions 8
Debt summary
The toil pile
Your SREs have unique resource constraints
Fowler's quadrants for operational debt
Practical applications ... backlogs
Practical applications ... toil reduction
Practical applications ... unknown unknowns
Practical applications ... unknown ur