This summary of the “On-call schedules must be flexible” post from my personal blog explains why flexible scheduling is the foundational feature of On-Call Optimizer.
On-Call should fit around your life
The most important aspect of an effective on-call schedule is to minimise conflict between assigned on-call shifts and the many existing commitments that place demands on our time and energy. Attempting to balance time and attention between on-call and a conflicting committment adds stress to what is often an already stressful situation. That stress not only lowers the effectiveness of the on-call response itself but contributes to the feeling that on-call is a duty rather than an opportunity to learn.
The common “industry standard” approach - round-robin assignment of shifts to team members in a fixed order - is as close to the worst possible method of creating an effective on-call schedule as you could achieve.
Flexible on-call schdules
In constrast to static round-robin assignments, a flexible on-call schedule matches each member to the shift(s) best suited for their lifestyle and commitments while also maintaining a balanced assignment between members and ensuring shifts are spread out as much as possible. This type of flexibility in scheduling delivers three major benefits for a team:
- Barriers to entry to participate in on-call are lowered as team members gain confidence that on-call shifts will not interfere with other commitments in their life.
- Stress levels during on-call shifts are reduced leading to improved outcomes as on-call responders can focus on the response without distraction from conflicting commitments.
- Wide participation in low-stress on-call shifts provides a foundation upon which effective team practices can be established to drive iterative improvement and learning over time.
Achieving flexibility
Creating flexible assignments feels more complicated than using a fixed round-robin schedule due to the combinatorial explosion of potential shift assignments that must be evaluated. Luckily, while complicated for a human, this type of optimization problem is well understood and straightforward to solve in software.
On-Call Optimizer links with your existing calendar system to allow you to provide simple “tags” (e.g. no-oncall, prefer-oncall) anywhere in the title or description of a calendar event which are used when assigning on-call shifts.
You can choose how far in advance this assignment process runs to strike a balance between maximising the amount of notice in advance of being scheduled for a shift and the degree of forward planning of your calendar events that is required.
The result is flexible, effective on-call schedules with minimum effort and time required from the team. The perfect foundation from which to continue building an on-call practice that delivers learning and growth!
