Being Interrupt or MRO

This document refers to the maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) or also called Interrupt guy or girl often done in R&D teams.

Starting your Interrupt/MRO

At the beginning of the day, one people in the team:

• Check if any incident happened during the night (tickets or new emails, slack channels like #mro # interrupt #incident_room #sre)
• Assign yourself the in-progress tickets that belonged to the MRO person

What is done during Interrupt/MRO?

An MRO/Interrupt people is fully dedicated to this process. He don’t work on our sprint tickets during the day. He firstly treat alerts and incidents then user questions by Slack or emails. Automated alerts should be the highest priority.

Third, MRO/Interrupt people treat minor tickets in the Kanban or Agile board. You should work on tickets most of the time, for example fixing something must always be tracked by an ticket.

You can treat ticket in the following order:

• first on “in progress” tickets. Assign them to you as soon as you start to work on them. You can assign to you the ticket assigned to someone else.
• when all tickets in progress are blocked or done. Treat the first ticket in the column “Backlog”

You should try to avoid starting dozens of tickets. It is better to close existing tickets.

Ending your Interrupt/MRO

At the end of the day, do your handover:

• resolve/close all tickets you have done
• post a comments in Slack channel to the current tickets that are not done often called “Evening check”

Most team members like to hilight in slack the main topics they’ve worked on to ease next guy job.

Planning

Rotations can be seen by a calendar or now by Slack with a bot every at 9am. Each day, an new MRO people is designated:

It is also important to note and taken into account that the MRO people can be on duty for the night. For him, you should avoid to assign MRO to the next day.