Unplanned Work: The Impact on DevOps Teams

DevOps teams face growing stress and burnout due to the increasing pressure to rapidly release new products while maintaining reliability and quality, exacerbated by unplanned work such as application failures and outages. PagerDuty's commissioned research highlights the negative impact of unplanned work on hundreds of global technology teams, revealing that 71% of respondents report technology issues leading to customer dissatisfaction, and over 70% of tech staff experience stress, anxiety, and reduced work-life balance. Automation emerges as a crucial tool for alleviating stress and managing unplanned work, with teams employing it experiencing less stress and more focus on product development timelines. The upcoming PagerDuty Summit will offer insights from DevOps practitioners on managing unplanned work and mitigating burnout through improved automation and alerting practices, with sessions covering topics like Site Reliability Engineering practices and strategies for reducing on-call burdens to enhance customer experience without causing burnout.