Engagement Framework: Driving Reliability and Resilience through SRE
At Five9nes, clients engage us to navigate complex crises and systemic issues across their technical and operational landscapes. While each engagement has unique goals and outcomes, our approach is grounded in a structured methodology that allows us to quickly diagnose challenges and deliver high-impact solutions. Here’s an overview of how we typically engage with clients during the first phase of our SRE consulting engagements.
Day 1: Aligning on Objectives and Understanding the Problem
We begin with a structured kickoff meeting, designed to establish clear goals and set mutual expectations. This session is crucial for aligning leadership and stakeholders on the key objectives, and it gives us an opportunity to understand "the problem" as the client perceives it.
Following this, we immerse ourselves in the existing landscape through informal presentations by those closest to the problem—engineers, operations staff, and architects. These sessions are key to understanding current processes, system architecture, past risk assessments, and operational pain points. We emphasize that no new materials should be created for us. Instead, we request authentic, unfiltered insights from existing documentation and content. This allows us to grasp the situation as it truly is, without the biases of re-packaged presentations.
Days 2 and Beyond: Deep Dive, Iteration, and Collaboration
Building upon the foundation established on Day 1, our team dives into the specifics of the problem. We ask probing questions, review documentation, and collaborate directly with the client’s teams. Our approach is iterative—we generate ideas, validate assumptions, and make hands-on adjustments where necessary. Our goal is to ensure that we are not just diagnosing issues but actively implementing changes alongside your team.
Throughout the engagement, we participate in the client’s regular meetings and incident response processes. This hands-on approach allows us to experience challenges in real-time and contribute to immediate problem resolution. By midweek, our focus shifts to working with hands-on experts—those maintaining your systems, whether they are software engineers, database administrators, or customer support teams. These experts are critical to unearthing the nuanced details of the system and operational workflows, often providing the most valuable insights. We encourage cross-functional collaboration and seek introductions to key personnel across the organization, progressively building a comprehensive view of the environment.
Daily Check-ins: Continuous Feedback and Rapid Adaptation
Most of our clients prefer daily check-ins—brief, focused meetings held in the morning and evening to discuss emerging questions, share preliminary findings, and address roadblocks. These touchpoints ensure that our efforts remain aligned with client priorities and that we can quickly adapt to new developments or unexpected challenges.
Final Day: Presenting Recommendations and Actionable Insights
The last day of the engagement is dedicated to delivering our recommendations. We present these to leadership and key stakeholders, providing a roadmap that is both strategic and actionable. Our recommendations are grounded in data, tailored to your organizational context, and designed to drive tangible improvements in system reliability and operational efficiency.
Collaborative and Agile Structure
At Five9nes, we operate as a tightly-knit team with no rigid hierarchy. Each consultant brings specialized expertise, and we match our skill sets to the client’s specific needs throughout the engagement. A primary point of contact is assigned to each project, ensuring seamless communication and accountability. However, behind the scenes, we collaborate extensively to avoid duplication of efforts and ensure that our insights are shared across all workstreams.
Access Requirements: Speeding Time to Value
To maximize our impact, we prioritize gaining direct access to client systems as early as possible—ideally by the end of Day 1. The key tools we typically require access to include:
Real-time communication platforms (Slack, Microsoft Teams, IRC)
Document repositories (SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox)
Monitoring consoles (New Relic, Grafana, Google Analytics)
Source code repositories (GitHub, GitLab)
This direct access allows us to operate efficiently, making rapid, data-driven decisions and implementing changes where necessary to accelerate progress.
Deliverables: Actionable and Tailored Solutions
Before any engagement begins, we work closely with clients to define clear deliverables, which are documented in the statement of work. Our focus is on providing actionable recommendations—solutions that can be implemented immediately to improve system reliability and performance. While we favor concise, highly actionable memos over lengthy reports, we are fully equipped to deliver detailed process maps, architecture diagrams, and long-form assessments when required.
Navigating Complex Organizations
When working with large organizations, especially those with thousands of employees or multiple C-suite stakeholders, we often require support from an executive administrative assistant or a project manager. These roles are invaluable in helping us navigate complex organizational structures, secure time with critical experts, and facilitate smooth project coordination. Their assistance ensures that we are always speaking to the right people and gaining the insights needed to make meaningful change.
Conclusion
At Five9nes, our engagements are designed to deliver rapid, high-impact results by combining deep technical expertise with a collaborative, hands-on approach. Whether addressing an immediate crisis or building a long-term reliability strategy, we partner with our clients to transform operational resilience and unlock sustainable business value.