Landing page for all my content related to the On-Call Scheduling application on ServiceNow.
I realized when finalizing my first video for On-Call Scheduling that I had forgot to make a video clip that makes the case for organized On-Call Scheduling from the perspectives of roles like the Engineer, the Group leader and the Incident Manager. The first video was already getting a bit long so I decided to leave it out and rather add it here as a blog.
Why organized On-Call in a tool like ServiceNow can make sense from different perspectives:
Ensure you get time of from operational work, You can spend this time on:
Engineering automations that can help remediate future Alerts, before they become real Incidents
Writing Knowledge Articles or Playbooks that helps your team and perhaps other teams in your organization tackle future Incidents.
Fairness. It’s no longer always you that needs to leave the townhall meetings when the Incident comes in.
When the shifts and the rosters are organized in a centrally managed tool, like ServiceNow, then everybody knows where to find information about your teams schedule, they will ping your On-Call resource rather than disturbing your whole team. Your On-Call Agent can assess if help from other team members is really needed.
On the flipside of this, you and your team also saves time when you need help from teams managing other tecnical domains or services, to get your Incidents resolved.
This is perhaps the most important perspective of all, when your organziation is trying to deal with a major Incident that is hurting your reputation and ability to do business. The Incident Manager will setup a bridge call with members of any team he or she thinks might be needed to resolve the Incident as quickly as possible. Knowing that ServiceNow will contain updated information about who is in call in those respective teams can save valuable time.