Workflow is an essential part of a daily routine, from brushing your teeth at home to performing a complex operational procedure at work. Recently, I had the exciting opportunity to address a routine-related challenge at work, one that involved realizing one of our processes was in dire need of some improvements as well as coming up with unique solutions and exploring how these solutions would impact workflow and, eventually, morale.

This blog post covers automation, including the usefulness of color-codingwith a little mindfulness mixed in too. Im sharing this with the hope you will take away some of the strategies I found were useful and use them to improve your own work environment.

Over the past several years, Ive performed a lot of maintenance planning at Hurricane Labs, checking all supported hosts for app updateswhether they had a web interface or not. Needless to say, my days were consumed by the monotonous journey through the lengthy task of checking out all the apps for any necessary updating.

For those of you who work with a distributed environment, you know this isnt always as easy as going to the apps page in your Splunk instance.

Eventually, I realized this daunting daily task was in need of some sort of automation. So decided to see if there was a better waythere had to be, right?

I ended up tearing apart the way the update-checking process works with Splunkbase, and I found a very easy pattern for formatting URLs that redirect you to the proper destination on their site. From there, I kludged together scripts and one-liners to make a workflowone which would extract information about every installed app without depending on anything past basic BASH tools. Ultimately, my approach required no additional tools or permission from management to make changes, and I was able to show my work so others can use it, too.

As we started to see places for improvement, one of our supervisorsSteve McMasterredid the idea with Python and his own vision on completing the task. Note that it is more intuitive now, and the results of the new version printed were more accurate and polished aesthetically. Ultimately, it was easy to read, effective at returning accurate results, and it left an overall good feel about planning the maintenance procedure.

P.S. Mine was a series of bash scripts that were initially one. I then made one script to run all the other scripts I eventually made. Doitforme.sh was a masterpiece of a BASH scriptery, just so you all know! Enough about my work though; it is obsolete. We are a Python family now.

As McMasters work was evolving, it was clear some other parts of our process needed to change. I was not doing maintenance for a couple months while all this was getting sorted out, so I got to work with customers a lot morewhich meant I was working more with our internal wiki.

It occurred to me that the data about the Splunk servers were pretty hard to readthe tables were lengthy and harsh on the eyes, being in just black and white. It was difficult and time consuming to read these tables, whether you were doing maintenance or working a ticket.

This year, I started doing a little research on a condition called synesthesiathis not only relates to my personal experiences with it but it also connects to the color-coding section Im about to get into in the upcoming section.

Im not going to go into much detail about that in this blog post, but according to an article in Psychology Today, synesthesia can be associativeso senses are connected and associated in a persons mind. Interestingly, the article says this can make connections between concepts easier to forge, and so can enhance creativity and memory.

Heres the article if you want to do a little more investigating about it on your own: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/synesthesia

I plan on doing more research into human behavior and psychology and finding ways to apply it to both my professional and personal lives. Its truly fascinating once you start diving into the mindthe rabbit hole never seems to end!

The cool thing about color coding, similar to what the above article on synesthesia suggests, is that it can help the mind identify items quickly. If I change the Splunk server roles in a color uniformly across all customer pages, it will become instilled into the engineers minds once they learn the system.

Read the original here:
A Design with Humans in Mind: Adding Automation and Color Coding to the IT Workflow - Security Boulevard