OP here. Thank you for the kind remarks. Apologies because I can speak only in generalities; the devil is always in the details. As such this opinion, not presc

OP here. Thank you for the kind remarks. Apologies because I can speak only in generalities; the devil is always in the details. As such this opinion, not prescription. I read your description as working through a conundrum of priorities, goals, and outcomes. Perhaps the way is to not get stuck in the weeds of either machines or computers. What outcome(s) matter for the overall system? What measures make sense in service of achieving those outcomes? How will people get feedback about progress in service of the outcomes? I am not suggesting some transplanted management framework (OKRs, I'm looking at you). Rather wondering about the small set of things you can get everyone to buy into and work towards. Decision making should become more tractable --- do the magic numbers even matter in the big picture? They may, if you desire to stay within a certain failure rate and/or error bounds, and it turns out the magic numbers are part of the problem. A thing like this won't be obvious in the beginning, you will to investigate things. Being able to say "hey, our stuff is failing at X rate and it is hurting our product/business in A, B, C ways" should help negotiate with management for the time / resource budget. Sometimes it may not be worth it, and so it may be wiser to drop that battle and focus on other outcomes. The investigation ought to be useful later. I noted Gene Kim's initiative [1] in my post (no affiliation). I feel like that collection of resources will give you much to work with. If you had to pick one of those, I would recommend the Accelerate [2] book. And, if you wish to talk about any of it, I'm happy to discuss more: https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#standing-invitation https://www.evalapply.org/index.html#standing-invitation [1] https://itrevolution.com/the-idealcast-podcast/ https://itrevolution.com/the-idealcast-podcast/ [2] https://itrevolution.com/product/accelerate/ https://itrevolution.com/product/accelerate/ (edit: expand on the main part of the response)