What is Digital On-Call Scheduling?
What is Digital On-Call Scheduling?
Digital on-call scheduling is the process of creating defined times, schedules and rotations for shift members, using a console or interface. For incident alert management, the on-call schedule is used to automatically (digitally) alert designated team members when a critical incident happens. Members of an IT on-call team are usually responsible for responding to IT alerts during after-hours, vacation times and weekend periods. Digital on-call scheduling is also key to ensuring the integrity of IT functions, uptime and ops functionality 24×7.
Why is Digital On-Call Scheduling Important? What are the Benefits?
Manages Alert Fatigue and Burnout
Digital on-call scheduling enables teams to better manage the burden of after-hours calls so that team members take turns being responsible for the company’s important IT functionality. Since responsibilities are rotated and are represented in the digital schedule, no one person is responsible for all IT outages and the workload is balanced and fair so alert fatigue and burnout are minimized.
Minimizes Downtime
When network interruptions, equipment failures or equipment problems arise, the cost of the ensuing downtime can be significant. Downtime can cost medium-sized enterprises as much as $1 million per year and large enterprises more than $60 million. By having a digital on-call scheduling system in place, IT teams can be assured that critical alerts will get immediate attention and be forwarded to the right on-call engineer to resolve the issue.
Enables Use of a Mobile Solution
By integrating the digital on-call scheduling platform with a mobile solution like a smartphone, managers can integrate on-call schedules to apps on responders’ smartphones which will translate engineering issues into persistent and prominent alerts.
In addition, smartphone alerts can include a detailed message highlighting what technology issue the team is facing, unlike communications from pager systems.
Alerts Aren’t Missed if a Team Member isn’t Available
Alerts can escalate to the next engineer on call if the primary on-call engineer is unavailable. By including an escalation component to the on-call schedule, managers can ensure that alerts are never missed.
Introducing: Schedule Exceptions
On-call schedule exceptions come in handy when making one-time manual adjustments to on-call recurring schedules. It enables administrators to easily create an exception to a schedule when a user is sick, has to go on a vacation, or would simply like to swap on-call periods with someone else.
Schedule Exceptions are now available on the OnPage web management console.
WHITE PAPER : How to Survive Being On Call
On-call engineers want to resolve issues as quickly as possible and return to their regularly scheduled life (or sleep). Yet, on-call schedules are often muddled by poor communication tools and policies which impede a quick resolution.
The Seven Steps to Mastering On-call Scheduling guide shows how teams can improve on-call scheduling, including:
- The importance of including alert escalations
- The need for effective communication tools
- The part played by post-mortem meetings and reviews
