Process Design: Rollout a Risky Change
Understand how to manage risky change rollouts in technical environments by clarifying scope, identifying risks, proposing mitigations, and setting up monitoring and rollback plans to ensure smooth deployment and minimize impact.
We'll cover the following...
Question
You need to rollout a risky change, such as a system-wide configuration change or new binary deployment. How would you do that?
Background
Managing change in an ambiguous environment is a core part of the TPM skillset, whether it is a process, system, or feature change. This question is designed to exercise this skill and provide a framework to help you do so.
Similar to a previous question, we’ll use a role playing approach to simulate a real live interview.
Solution approach
We will use the following structured approach for this question:
- Clarify the scope of the change.
- Outline the potential risks.
- Propose mitigations for these risks.
Sample answer
Interviewee: First, I’d like to understand the scale and scope of the change to understand the potential impact. These are some questions I have:
- How will the change be deployed? How fast will the change be felt?
- How many machines will be impacted?
- What are the potential negative effects of this change? How many users would be impacted?
- How fast can we rollback if something goes wrong?
- Do we have access to a test environment to validate