We have reasonably complex on-call schedule (follow-the-sun, using three 8 hour shifts) which includes around 60 people. Managing unavailability and creating overrides has historically been a manual process. With school closures due to COVID-19 a significant portion of the team are working modified or reduced hours, and we have many more exceptions to manage.
We’re looking for some advice about how best to define a low-touch process for managing these exceptions, where:
- each team member can indicate when they’re unavailable to cover a scheduled on-call shift
- the rest of the team has visibility of this, and can volunteer to take an override
Our thoughts so far:
- Create another user account named “Coverage Needed”, or similar
- Each team member creates overrides using the “Coverage Needed” user if they have a conflict
- We poll the list overrides API, filtering on overrides for “Coverage Needed” user
- Use this to notify the broader team (via email or Slack), asking for volunteers
- Volunteers update the override to themselves
This should solve our problem, however before setting this up we wanted to ask if there is a better way to manage on-call operator unavailability/overrides in a dynamic environment?