The Sleuth Journal reports on the importance of scheduling and alert management for on-call IT teams
The following is an excerpt form the thesleuthjournal.com
Having an IT team on-call is very important to ensuring your company’s end product retains its high level of quality. Without this component, it would be considerably harder for the IT team to get the information they need when issues do arise. Additionally, it would also be a lot harder for the IT team to accurately trace and respond to occurrences regarding the product’s development.
But now that we’ve settled how having an IT-on call schedule is important, we need to be realistic about how inconvenient IT on-call can be at times. Many IT professionals lament their on-call experiences. Here, however, we will give you some insight into how you can put together an on-call schedule that helps your business.
Answering the call
One of the biggest problems with on-call is that alerts are poorly reported due to the lack of a competent alerting system. If the alert is reported, it fails to go to the correct engineer who could actually answer the call. The alert gets passed from one department to another. So when it finally reaches the correct on-call individual, it’s nowhere near as riveting.
The answer to this problem is to implement a messaging system that competently picks up alerts and makes sure problems are adequately handled from the get-go. A platform like OnPage for Secure Messaging which provides an app and console can help an IT business answer on-call alerts thoroughly and act with much greater efficiency.
The advantages of uses an app
A mobile app eliminates the necessity of a physical pager for alerts. It’s a much cleaner approach that is not only more convenient but also more efficient because planning and scheduling are improved. A mobile app presents the opportunity to respond promptly and correctly assign issues to the most qualified engineer.
Compensatory hours
Being an on-call engineer can be really annoying if there is no financial compensation for the extra working hours. It is very important that an engineer who has been answering on-call alerts for several hours receives time off from work. This not only benefits their physical health but also their mental condition. It can be quite stressful to lose sleep and then still be expected to show up for work. A proper program that rewards on-call agents with time off helps maintain a balance. It’s important to remember that employees and co-workers are just as valuable and important as customers.
On-call responsibility for IT teams is definitely not something that IT professionals want or like, but there’s no arguing about the fact that it is an important factor in the development process of a new product. Without this component, the entire growth process of a product will be hindered. Knowing how to properly manage on-call operations however can make things a lot easier to digest, as it puts less strain on everyone.
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