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Operational and Tactical Meetings

A platform that serves several workload teams needs fixed moments to talk. This page describes two recurring meetings between the platform team and the customer, and what to put on the agenda. The pattern works in both operating models: in the managed model the participants are XMMS and the customer's cloud team; in the self-managed model they are your platform team and its stakeholders.

Frequencies, participants and tools below are suggestions. Agree your own in the contract or the onboarding document.

Operational meeting Tactical meeting
Purpose Keep the day-to-day work moving Steer the service and the platform
Frequency Every two weeks (example) Monthly or quarterly (example)
Duration 30 to 60 minutes 60 minutes
Participants Platform team engineers, the customer's cloud platform contact, a security contact when needed Service owner, platform team lead, security officer or architect, product owner of the platform
Input Open work items, incidents, planned changes, release notes Monthly health check, service level figures, post-mortems, roadmap
Output Decisions on work items, a list of actions with owners Priorities, improvements, accepted risks, agreement on release windows

Operational meeting

Agenda

  1. Actions from the last meeting.
  2. New features and releases: which version is out, which is planned, when it will be taken (What to do when a new version is released). Ask about upcoming tooling updates that depend on Microsoft (for example a new base image for the build agents) and who is watching them.
  3. Work items: open standard changes and requests, especially those that are old, blocked, or complex.
  4. Incidents since the last meeting, and the status of post-mortem actions.
  5. Way of working: improvements to how requests are made and handled.
  6. Security: findings, exemptions that expire, anything the security officer needs to decide.
  7. Any other business, and the date of the next meeting.

Rules that keep it useful

  • Send the agenda and the list of work items beforehand.
  • Take short minutes: decisions and actions with an owner and a date. Do not copy the discussion. Store them in one place that all participants can read, one page per meeting.
  • Record who was present and who was absent with notice, so decisions can be traced.
  • An action that is not done is carried over once, then discussed or dropped.

Example outcome: reducing mistakes in complex requests

A recurring theme in operational meetings is that a manual, multi-part request (for example several spokes with special naming and network agreements in one request) produces human errors. Two options that were discussed:

  1. Keep requests small. One spoke per request, so the work can be shared among engineers.
  2. Let the workload team prepare the pull request itself. This needs authorisation on the configuration repository, branch policies with two approvals (first the customer's platform contact, final approval the platform team), a maintained IP plan that the workload team may update, and written instructions for the team. See Change workflow and New spoke.

Tactical meeting

Agenda

  1. The monthly health check: the three most important findings and what to do about them.
  2. Service levels: availability, incident and standard change resolve times against the targets. Explain the outliers.
  3. Post-mortems and the status of their actions.
  4. Capacity and cost: quota, budgets, reservations, the growth of the number of spokes (Cost and reservations).
  5. Security and compliance: secure score trend, policy exemptions, accepted risks.
  6. Roadmap: planned platform versions, new features workload teams ask for, maintenance windows for the coming period (Maintenance calendar).
  7. Changes to the service or to the contract.

Notes template

# <Operational | Tactical> meeting - <date>

Present: <roles or names>
Absent: <names> (with notice / without notice)

## Agenda
- ...

## Decisions
- ...

## Actions
| Action | Owner | Due |
|---|---|---|
| ... | ... | ... |

## Work items discussed
<ids of tickets or work items>