Perhaps your on-call strategy isn’t working even after implementing it. Of course, everyone wants support services that are available at all hours. Your on-call process could be inefficient, outdated, or clunky. You could be having a solution to your IT on call rotation, but you aren’t sure where to start. Today’s companies have access to numerous on-call scheduling methods. While some of them seem sophisticated, each has its limitations.
Dropped Alerts
While it seems sophisticated, one can use monitoring tools to automate incident alerts. For instance, companies can send out an SMS message or emails and configure telephone numbers and addresses through their monitoring tools. However, this option only works for single-level on-call scheduling.
Delayed Response Time
Deploying a 24hours Network Operating Center is a less complicated, but labor-intensive on-call scheduling option. It involves the deployment staff members to identify problems and monitor metrics all day manually. Staff members have to notify the person in charge of on-call scheduling to resolve any issue that may have popped up. Not only is this costly, but also inefficient in many ways. A lot of time goes to waste when diagnosing a problem, looking up who is on call, and sending them a notification.
Notification Fatigue
Some companies opt to send out SMS blasts and emails to everyone on the team to minimize their on-call scheduling costs. Not only is this unfair, but also inefficient to the entire team. In fact, this decreases the sense of urgency and creates spam when the incident team receives alerts. It will also necessitate the need to buy a personal and work phone for your employees. Moreover, team members will often leave issues unacknowledged hoping that someone else will acknowledge them in the last minute. Consequently, more employees will quit especially when the company fails to respect their downtime.
Unfair On-Call Burden
Today’s companies hand off a single pager or phone to the next on-call person and use it as an on-call solution. While many organizations still use this solution, it often seems antiquated in today’s smartphone age. However, this method doesn’t work well when the on-call phone loses signal. It may also not work if the pager or on-call telephone get damaged or lost. Moreover, this solution can’t be ideal for a company with its team spread across a vast region.
No Authoritative On-Call Schedules Source
Many companies often send CSV or Excel via email to notify everyone the person that will be in charge of on-call for the next week or month. Similarly, that creates a noisy inbox and leave the incident team wondering what will happen if changes are done on an on-call schedule. You are not alone if you are facing any of the above issues. Many companies are experiencing the nightmare of inefficient on-call scheduling. However, one can use a single platform to increase efficiency and simplicity and address all of the above problems. It’s also possible to use a single platform to escalate rules, manage the entire on-call schedules, and alleviate all of the above issues.
