Here I list some simple rules to live well in IT Operations, from my experience; these rules are to be taken as they are, with no warranty, and exceptions can apply.

1. No releases on Fridays

Friday is sacred and the weekend is spent with family, friends, or even just chilling out. Do not jeopardize your weekend with a Friday release.

2. Production is sacred

Do not touch the production environment, even if the option seems compelling. Copy the environment somewhere else, safe, and play with it. You would spend the same amount of time for copying the environment, to fix possible outages in production caused by your actions.

3. Make Team decisions and foster communication

Do not decide for yourself, always involve the team in your final decisions. Speak with your Team and with stakeholders, communication is at the base of early civilization and can be the game changer even nowadays.

4. In case of outages, focus on production

In case of outages focus on fixing the production environment, lower environments (dev, stage, etc...) can wait, but customers do not.

5. Do not overdo, and do not always follow your gut

Do what you are asked to do, and do not overdo tasks; this is not to be confused with "do the minimal acceptable", but is just a foster to follow your task guardrails and not do things that can lead to issues. For me following my gut sometimes leads to issues, so I also learned how to ignore it :)