Weekend/Weekday Schedule for a single team

#1

Hello,
In my team, we’re trialling a new schedule: people are either oncall during the week (Monday 11am to Friday 11am) or during the weekend (Friday 11am to Monday 11am).

As an example, let’s say we have Alice, Bob, Charlie on the team. What we’d like to see is a rota like this:

  1. Week 1 - Weekdays: Alice
  2. Week 1 - Weekend: Bob
  3. Week 2 - Weekdays: Charlie
  4. Week 2 - Weekend: Alice
  5. Week 3 - Weekdays: Bob
  6. …

This use case is one of the schedule examples, but in the example two different teams are responsible for the weekday or weekend shifts. In our case, only one team needs to be on the schedule. For now we’ve hacked it by having the same list of people in both teams, but that’s hardly ideal.

Does anyone have a better solution? :slight_smile:

#2

Hi Alessandro,

Thanks for sending in this question.

You can create a schedule with this type of weekly rotation on just one schedule:

  • All 3 users in one layer for the Rotation Type of weekly with the Restrict on-call shifts to specific times set as Monday 11:00 to Friday 11:00

  • All 3 users in another layer with Rotation Type of weekly with the Restrict on-call shifts to specific times set as Friday 11:00 to Monday 11:00

If you need any assistance with this setup, feel free to reach out to the support team (support@pagerduty.com).

Cheers,
Abbott

#3

Hi Abbott,

Thanks for your reply.
Would it be ok to continue the conversation here, so it can benefit everyone in the community?

The setup you suggest is almost exactly the one we’ve implemented (the only difference being, we didn’t need the restriction in the base layer, as the additional layer will override weekends anyway).
The problem with it is that both layers go through the list of people in parallel. So going back to my example above, what we’d end up with is:

  1. Week 1 - Weekdays: Alice
  2. Week 1 - Weekend: Alice
  3. Week 2 - Weekdays: Bob
  4. Week 2 - Weekend: Bob
  5. Week 3 - Weekdays: Charlie
  6. …

As a workaround, we’ve staggered the two list of users (so that one is Alice, Bob, Charlie and the other one is Charlie, Alice, Bob), but that’s hardly ideal for maintaining those lists.

Is there any way to do this more cleanly?

#4

Hi Alessandro,

This may be due to what you have set as your scheduled hand-off time. Without seeing the schedule, I’m not 100% sure why it may be happening that way. Your workaround should resolve the issue that happens with having the users on both weekdays/weekends during the same week. We don’t currently offer a better way to change that outside of changing the handoff time.

Thanks,
Abbott Brannon
Tech Support Specialist

#5

Hi Alessandro,

Let me check if I understand you well.

only one team needs to be on the schedule

I understand the same list of users, not a PagerDuty team resource.

I think you can set the schedule layers as you lastly said and with the same order in the list of users. But update the
Step 3 : Changes should take effect at
on the 2nd layer with the layer 1 value + 1 week.
It should be enough to shift the rotation between weekdays and weekends. And keep the list in the same order (better readability IMHO)

Note you need to manage by yourself the list of users on each layer. No way to set it only once AFAIK. It’s why having them in the same order is better for me.

I tried it

image
image.png3030Ă—2116 493 KB

Regards,
SĂ©bastien

#6

Thanks SĂ©bastien.
You’re correct: I misused the word “team” in my post: I just meant a list of users.

Your workaround is interesting, but I’m left wondering what’s going to happen if we need to add or remove users from the rota. Are we going to have to finagle with the start time for Layer 2 to get the shifts to align properly every time?

#7

I never experienced it.

But as the “change effect” input is “today” by default in the Web UI, yes I think you have to set it on each layer with the same logic when you add a new user to the list.
If not, you can let the same dates but change the user lists order (as mentioned, I don’t prefer this one as it’s harder to be sure to have the right users and the right rotation order … especially if there are many users).

Do it your preferred way. I don’t know any other solutions.

PS: For both solutions, you can use API or Terraform, then updates are easy.

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