Why reliability matters
Whatever your role in the construction and operations of production systems, reliability tends to be the number one worry that leaves you unable to go to sleep at night. Ironically, reliability issues are also most likely to wake you up with a page at 2:00 a.m.
You've seen the ugly red dashboards when something goes wrong and worse, the angry posts from affected customers on social media when reliability becomes an issue.
Reliability problems go beyond the immediate annoyance. They have a real and lasting effect on individuals and organizations. Reliability issues can cause you and your organization to lose:
- Money: lost business revenues, lost worker productivity, overtime pay.
- Time: outages are unplanned work that takes up time you planned for other things.
- Reputation: customers are quick to lose patience and switch to a competitor when a service is seen to be flaky or slow.
- Health: interrupted sleep, family and vacation time are disturbed, no time for self-care. The stress of an unpleasant job and the inability to ever get caught up, take a physical and psychological toll.
- Hiring: word gets out that your work environment is unpleasant and talented candidates don't apply for your open roles as a result
You have both a personal and professional stake in making your systems and services as reliable as possible. The good news is that there are steps you can take and tools you can use to help with reliability issues.