Reliability Manager Job Description

The Impact of Reliability on the Bottom-Line Performance and Performance Management

The impact reliability has on the bottom-line performance of the organization, including the share price, must be understood by your leaders. The effectiveness with which equipment is managed affects the valuation of equipment asset dependent organizations. Reliability management is more than just doing maintenance better.

Without senior leaders who are willing to make plant reliability management a matter of corporate policy, it is not likely that you will gain traction and achieve lasting improvement. The reputation of the firm depends on the reliability of the machines and plant, especially when transactions carry penalties for late or non-delivery, and this something that the sales and marketing team understands. Projections of reliability are factored into their estimates of contract profitability.

The operations organization works closely with the maintenance team to provide inspection and operating health feedback on a regular basis, and supplies design engineers, procurement specialists and strategic suppliers with the information they need to improve equipment operability. The reliability focused organization works closely with design engineers, procurement specialists and strategic suppliers to improve design for reliability and maintainability and to avoid purchasing the same problems over and over again. Performance is a function of behaviors and talent management goes beyond just hiring people with the right skills for the job.

Skills can be taught. It is difficult to modify an individual's behaviors beyond a temporary interim period. Effective plant reliability management requires that you identify the behavioral characteristics required to succeed in your organization and in the job, the skills and knowledge required for the job, a method for assessing both, and tools and techniques for managing and retaining your talent.

Managers stopped relying on the skill of the operator the skill of the maintenance craft in applications where failure risk is potentially deadly. Expectations are defined by standard operating and maintenance procedures. Procedures clearly define skill requirements for a job.

Site Reliability Engineering: A Case Study

The SRE manager is in charge of building reliability into the product. An SRE team needs to be multi-talented because reliability in highly complex systems typically crosses between multiple programming languages, third-party services and integrations. Each person in an SRE team should have a wide range of knowledge in many other IT operations and software development skills.

SRE managers need a broad knowledge of the IT infrastructure and applications and the ability to pull different disciplines together for a common goal. SRE managers need to know how different disciplines can come together on an SRE team. SRE teams need to work with some level of autonomy because they act somewhat independently from other engineering teams.

It is important that site reliability engineering managers are connected with the broader IT, engineering and business teams to stay up-to-date on feature development and how it could affect the system's overall reliability. Chaos engineering principles should be used by site reliability engineering managers to run tests through their applications and infrastructure. SRE teams are increasing system reliability at every turn by learning about your technical systems through chaos engineering and taking advantage of game days to practice the human element of incident response.

In 2016 a post was released about the way they approach SRE. The company has changed over the years, but their goal in SRE remains the same. The team was constantly trying to show the reality of how their systems and people worked and then create repeatable processes that ensure reliability without disrupting speed or scaling.

Reliability Engineers

More and more work specialization has been introduced in the organizations with the growing needs of engineering departments. People that were supposed to perform their jobs on a broader spectrum have to focus on more specific jobs and other jobs have been created with more work specialization. The growing needs of the firms have created a job for reliability engineer.

Reliability engineers have to manage assets. They are responsible for the risk of high cost assets. Reliability engineers have to perform many tasks in the firms in order to provide the firm with the maximum protection against heavy risks associated with the huge investments in the assets and processes of the firms.

They have to be careful about utilization of the equipment and make sure that the equipment is being run properly. They work with the production managers and research and development staff to get an idea of what the organization is focused on. Reliability engineers are given the proper offices and labs in order to make them feel comfortable and they are also given all the necessary tools for communication with the world outside the organization.

Site Reliability Engineers: A Cloud-Native Approach

A site reliability engineer is a software developer with IT operations experience who knows how to code and keep the lights on in a large-scale IT environment. The site reliability engineers spend less than half of their time performing manual IT operations and system administration tasks, and more than half of their time developing code that can automate those tasks. They want to spend less time on the former and more on the latter over time.

A cloud-native development approach can simplify application development, deployment and scaling. Cloud-native development creates an increasingly distributed environment that complicates administration, operations and management. SRE teams can support innovation and ensure reliability without putting additional operations pressure on the teams that are already working.