RelOps - Introduction to Reliable Operations

This paper discusses and introduces the concept of RelOps. It is the process of combining the Reliability New Product Introduction, design, development, deployment, and sustaining functions. Reliability does impact product development, here we are utilizing the DevOps model to establish a new approach to manage product reliability function. It must be noted that there are challenges in implementing RelOps since traditional reliability engineers and functions have not been organized and trained as such. What are some of the challenges of today's product reliability functions that we want to address? Lack of end-to-end product reliability visibility. • Siloed experiences. • Connection between key functions such as hardware, software, test, fault management, analytics among others. • Too much focus on failure prediction based on old data. • Difficult to scale due to various headcounts needed to cover the main activities. • Lack of domain knowledge by the data scientist. RelOps is about multidisciplinary reliability team and enabling the culture of addressing multiple needs of reliability practices. What we mean by this, is the ability of the reliability engineer to cover multiple disciplines within the reliability team for a product. The challenge is to expand the reliability engineer's capabilities and streamline the reliability activities associated with any product. We will discuss this in more detail later in this paper. Let's breakdown this concept in such a way where we can define the functions, roles, and responsibilities. In a similar way as DevOps, we have the pipeline of building, testing, and releasing the products with planning and monitoring feedback loop. The key is how we break it down to make it feasible to implement. We are going to divide this subject into two main parts, reliability functional activities and skill development and requirements. In this paper we discussed the concept of RelOps and what are the expectations of a RelOps engineer. Clearly, we need to rethink the role of reliability function and its engineers in the new paradigm where AI plays a big role in how products are designed and operated. As new technologies are developing the impact of RelOps engineers is becoming more pronounced. The data driven strategy is the way to ensure products are performing their intended functions for the length of time they are designed for.