Global Teams - Multiple services - multiple schedules

#1

Hello,

Trying to plan out proper scheduling and rotas for a global team. Our scenario is a bit specific. I’m not sure if a new feature is required to solve this, or there is something I’m missing in design.

I say this with maybe 3 hours into learning PagerDuty, so I may not be conceptually grasping something yet.

Scenario:
We have 30 services we are alerting on.
We have 3 global teams, in America, Australia, and the UK
Each team has 4-7 team members (users) with varying rotations and schedules/changes
Not all services require all teams. i.e. 1 service may rely on all 3 teams, 10 services are team-specific, and the other 20 are say, half UK and AU, half US and UK, half AU And UK.

The only “logical” way I can fix this up, is to create a Schedule for each Region that is 100% each team. Then 3 schedules which are the combinations -> Split AU/UK, Split UK/US, Split US/AU. Then one final “Global” Follow the Sun schedule.

All fine and dandy; however if 1 person leaves or wishes to change rota, I have to update up to 4 Schedules, which is a bit of overhead.

My ask, am I missing something conceptually? I can think that nesting Schedules can resolve this, or being able to schedule “Teams” And then have a “Team Schedule” of the sorts.

Ideally what I want to achieve -

Schedule 1 For these 12 hours, call Team A, then switch to Team B for the second 12 (with all three possible combinations)

Schedule 2, Call out only Team A

Schedule 3 , Call out Team B for 8, Team C for 8, and Team A for 8

Then I would be able to set Team A’s rota (Via Team schedule or nested Schedule) So I only have to update 1 location, and all other parent schedules are accurate.

That’s in my minds eye, but I’m not sure if there is a better way to organize all of this. Assistance is much appreciated!

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#2

Hum you are over complicating your scheduling needs. I would split one schedule in 2 shift of 12 hours. Assign people on these shift depending on the day from pool A, B or C and try to make a pattern on who will be paged. So people have a good idea when the shift is on their shoulder.
Shift the responsibility of keeping the schedule up to date to you team. If John wants to be off on day Y , he needs to find someone to cover and the covering person should override the schedule. It worked like a charm for more than 3 years for my team.

#3

Thanks Ludovic, I was hoping I was over complicating it, but I still don’t see how I can reduce complexity needs.

The challenge is that I have 30 services, and my different teams does not support all of them.

So I have 3 teams. Support is team-specific of these solutions, as each solution (or reporting service) is 100% proprietary and different from the others. It takes immense knowledge and training to support each service.

Therefore if I only had 1 schedule, 12 hours of the day the services would go to a team that is not prepared to support the system.

I’m shooting for flexibility without having 7 schedules to update, and unfortunately I can’t prove that using only one schedule.

#4

I see 3 teams -> 3 schedules (not 7). And many services can be assigned one schedule. What am I not getting that make the schedule count go from 3 (one per team) to 7 ?

#5

Team 1 - 24 hour schedule - 7 services tied to that team/schedule/ep
Team 2 - 24 hour schedule - 3 services tied to that team/schedule/ep
Team 3 - 24 hour schedule - 10 services tied to that team/schedule/ep

Team 1 and 2 - 12 hour each - 3 services tied to that …
Team 2 and 3 - 12 hour each - 4 services tied to that …
Team 3 and 1 - 12 hour each - 1 service tied to that …

Global - Team 1,2,3 - 8 hour each - 2 services tied to that…

The challenge is, Team 1 will have the //same// rotation in //every calendar 1 week on, 7 weeks off. So I have to configure all 7 calendars with that single team’s rotation, and any other team that may apply has the same configuration.

Now one person leaves, I have to update 3 calendars (yes) but also for 6 other accounts to do a 6 week off instead of a 7 week rotation.

I think this can be solved if I can add a “team” to a calendar, instead of users, and manage the single “team” rotation on a weekly schedule. But again, I feel like I have a square and a circle here without extensive hours in PagerDuty. My support case stated this was not a feature, but could be requested as one.

Thanks for your interest and support! I appreciate the challenge/conversation.

#6

Hi @Alyason.vix,

I think you’re right - 7 schedules (3x 24-hour, 3x 12-hour, 1x 24-hour). You are effectively having to treat each of these schedules as different teams of people which is where your complexity comes in.

The adjustment however, is pretty simple - you would only need to add/modify/delete any given member in the three schedules they belong to once each schedule in the same way.

Example: you have 4 members in Team 1; Member 3 leaves the business.
Solution: remove Member 3 from each of the three Schedules they belong to - as long as they were ordered identically to begin with, they’ll still be match up.

This is always going to happen - when someone leaves the rotations become shorter, but the Schedule will take care of adjusting the other Scheduled Members. It’s not something you’ll have to do manually.

It may help to think in terms of PagerDuty Teams - they’re visibility portals, showing you only Alerts/Incidents/etc. assigned to that Team. How does that work? The Escalation Policy belongs to the Team (and by extension the Schedules).

If you divide everything you’re putting into PagerDuty in terms of a “PagerDuty Team” rather than a business team, and assigning visibility accordingly, then by extension each of the Schedules you want to create will belong to only one of these functional teams (PagerDuty Teams).

As far as how this works in PagerDuty - you are managing seven teams.

Separately to all of that, for only 3 hours with PagerDuty you really have grasped this well. I started this reply with “well, actually…” and quickly realised I was going to be wrong.

I think as far as your feature request goes, you’re looking to be able to add a time-filtered Schedule to an existing Schedule, such that you can configure a single 24-hour Schedule for a given group of individuals, then assign the existing 24-hour Schedule to multiple Schedules with a cut-out (like Support Hours) for the 24-hour Schedule to appear as an e.g. 12-hour or 8-hour Schedule in the target Schedule. Mmmm… Schedules.

Team 1 - 24-hour Schedule (T1)
Team 2 - 24-hour Schedule (T2)

Schedule 2x12 (S2)

Schedule S2 would include Schedule T1 with an availability window (Support Hours) of 12 hours - e.g. 10:00-22:00, and Schedule T2 with an availability window of 22:00-10:00.

Feel free to add that to your existing Support / Feature request. Hopefully it helps and welcome to PagerDuty!

Cheers,
@simonfiddaman

#7

Thank you for your response, Simon.

This is exactly what I am imagining as a solution, so thank you for your understanding and annotation. I will surely add that to the notes!

Thank you for your comment on the removing of team members as well. I think that certainly helps cut down on the overhead of what I’m trying to do here.

I appreciate your time and insight!

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