Scheduling question

#1

Apologies if this is not the correct location.

I have a team of users that are located in the US and UK. Traditionally, our on call rotation has been very simple. Everyone is in the rotation and it’s setup to be a weekly rotation with a handoff on Firday at 8:00 AM. Easy enough.

However, we want to adjust this now and add a little more complexity to it. I’ve been playing with this for a bit now but I think I am going blind.

My question is what’s the best way to set this up so when one of the US team members is on call, someone in the UK will cover the 2:00 AM to 11:00 AM hours for the US engineer, and when a UK engineer is on call, a US engineer will cover the 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM time frame. The weekends will be up to the whoever is the primary on call for that week so there is no business hours coverage over the weekend.

What I’m having issues with is some of the users are US based, and some of the engineers are UK based so I need my stop / start times different for that second layer. Some users will do 8 am to 5 pm central time, some will be 2:00 AM to 11:00 AM central time which is the UK users.

I’ve tried splitting this out to 3 layers…1 with the US team, 1 with the UK team, 1 with everyone and then restricting on call to certain times, but I end up with either the same person who is primary, also covering their own business hours which effectively cancels out what I am trying to accomplish. It’s not all the time when I look through the schedule just some times.

#2

Try with a schedule for each location (US and UK) with the appropriate coverage hours and then add both schedules to the same layer of the escalation policy.

#3

Thank you that makes sense. One question off of that, will that still honor the rotation though for all users? For example if we have 3 in the US and 3 in the UK, I now have the 2 different schedules, but will they end up cancelling each other out?

what I mean by that is between the 6 total users of the 2 teams above, that means only 1 user would only be on call every 6 weeks which is what I want to maintain with of course the breaks with someone in the opposite time zone covering the on call during their business hours.

To elaborate further, if both schedules are setup using a weekly rotation and I add both to the escalation policy, does that mean that whoever is is the current on call user for 2 schedules will receive the alert instead of just 1 user?

#4

Hello Matt,

Apologies no one’s come back to you regarding this issue.

So there are 2 options you can explore: Creating 2 schedules using the 24hr clock will ensure that one schedule does not cancel out the other as the on call responders should not be on call at the same time as each user will cover their own business hours.
Another option would be to create a Follow the Sun Schedule. You will find details on how to go about this here.

Kind regards,