People Just Want to Get Their Work Done: Stop Making Them Shave Yaks!

Ever sat down to do a seemingly simple task only to have to do another task before you can finish the simple one? We’ve all seen this famous clip from Malcom In The Middle. In the DevOps community moving down the chain of simple tasks that are perceived (or real) prerequisites to completing a simple task is called “Shaving the Yak”.

Throughout my professional career I’ve shaved countless yaks. (This is an amazing out-of-context sentence, that I hope will some day be featured as part of an intro about me). So what happens when we encounter a yak in the wild? Most people will try to do the work to shave the yak. But as the process gets increasingly complex more and more people will abandon the process. In some cases organizations use yaks under some misguided attempt at weeding out anyone but the people who truly want something.  These modern day King Solomons sit in their towers and have decided that only the worthy will get to the Submit button. The problem with this approach is that it only encourages people to work around your process. And no one wants that- your process was put in place for a reason- and probably a good one.

              Before I go on- I want to point out that some Yaks really need to be shaved because the process of shaving the Yak carries some importance. (I’ll cover these in more detail later- I just wanted you to know that you can’t call everything that requires work a “Yak” and declare that you’re not going to do it.

Here’s a list of the typical Yaks I’ve had to shave, and my advice on how you can stop these handing these Yaks to people.

The Simple Form

Whether you’re filing a tax return, putting in a change request to update software, or applying for college we’ve all come across this kind of Yak. Typically seen as a single form our Yak links to other forms and other systems that you have to fill in first in order to successfully submit the simple form.

What irritates me most about this kind of process is it’s usually time driven. So while you’re stressing about finishing the form you just know that on the next page there might be layers upon layers of complexity.

How to solve this:
Are you a person who sends their coworkers to this kind of task? Stop! If you have some regulatory reason why you can’t stop then at least put in estimated timelines and try to integrate everything into the form- no “go to schedule K and fill out the 10 lines there and then copy line 4 here “ nonsense.

And by the way- please please be a modern app and save progress as I go so that I don’t have to fill everything in from stractch.

The Permissions Yak

 This creature often shows up in medium and large organizations but never in small organizations. It usually takes the form of “You don’t have permissions to do this simple thing, and chasing down who can give you permissions looks like it’s going to take you days, maybe weeks. I’ve seen this for things as simple as “I need a distribution list created for my team” to “I want to purchase an SSL certificate,” or even “I want to use a cloud service”. In all the large fortune 00s I’ve worked for there is usually a process to do all of these tasks, and no, it’s not as simple as calling a help desk. The help desk typically closes the case as soon as they point me to a site or document that explains a lengthy process. In the most extreme case I remember that I had to contact the Chief Security Officer  for a Fortune 100 in order to authorize purchase of an SSL certificate. Granted this was back in 2006 but it was still pretty intimidating for me (and trivial for him).

How to avoid:
Just give people the power to make their own choices. Every <100 company I’ve worked at has had more distribution lists than people and no one cared. But for some reason every >24,000 company I’ve worked at wants to lock down DL creation. In reality this means some poor chap has to spend all day doing a task that he knows should have been automated. Just let people do what they want- or you’ll find that they start using thrirparty services without your knowledge.

The Checklist

This is a good yak. Checklists are written in blood. If you come across a 100 point check list for goodness sakes be careful and go through each item. And if you don’t understand why an item is on the list- PLEASE PLEASE ask. In fact even if you do understand why an item is on the list- ask anyway.

So in summary- people want to get work done. Don’t stand in their way.