I guess, a very important skill is to say no. It’s ok to be unavailable to finish a task.
A meeting without an agenda, from my experience, lacks focus and consequently often results. Sometimes asynchronous communication is enough… Personally, i try to concentrate meetings to specific days of the week, so that i have two, three days a week without major interruptions.
Regarding operations, i like to cite: “unplanned work is death to all other types of work, such as planned, or projects”
We do have an operation center, which routes events, incidents, information coming from all types of ingress(events, email, calls, incident tickets) to specific support groups.
Support groups, as does mine, have a so called “dispatcher” role. Someone’s main task for the week is to acknowledge incoming events, and to try to solve most (small) tasks themselves - to keep everyone’s back free; to concentrate unplanned work of the whole group.
I work for a MSP. Recently, i started to introduce Rundeck in my team for the following reasons.
My team has a significant amount of conventional sysadmins, mostly running linux-based servers, some kubernetes. We do use infrastructe-as-code tools, such as saltstack, have access to ci/cd platforms and various tools. However, my team has only a few people developing, most don’t really know how to use git, let alone gitlab/github/etc. This results into a situation where many admins prefer doing stuff manually, instead of writing code with our infrastructure tools. Though, most would be able to write bash scripts.
In order to “crowd-source” the development of our processes I needed a tool which is easy to use, somewhat easier to create workflows, and being managable (ldap, logging, acls), and adaptable (plugins, integrations), low costs, ideally open-source. Although our infrastructure wouldn’t need it since we already have capable tools, they are arguably too complex for my environment. complex in the meaning of not enough time/money to teach the majority of the team, lack of interest and motivation, etc.
My research resulted in Rundeck fitting best for my situation and requirements.
Though there were a few other contenders, since Rundeck is not the most efficient workflow engine, nor has the most integrations, biggest community, etc.
similar market to n8n are:
Initially, this list helped me to identify points of research: awesome workflow engines
If your team is familar with Rundeck, and it has sufficient acceptance, wouldn’t upgrading to a current version of Rundeck be an option?