Integrating many schedules

Rolling On-Call Optimizer out across many teams needs a plan. We suggest this order:

Preparation

• Initiate vendor onboarding and security reviews for On-Call Optimizer with your procurement and security teams.
  • Our security documentation and trust center contain commonly requested documents and certifications.
• Determine how your users will authenticate to On-Call Optimizer and which calendar provider they will be using.
  • Are there any approval or allow-listing steps required to authenticate with these systems from a new application?
  • Supported authentication providers are described in the authentication reference.
  • The list of supported calendar providers can also be found in the calendar documentation.
• Send an initial introduction to On-Call Optimizer to the organization.

Hi team,

Next week we start introducing On-Call Optimizer. It makes our on-call
schedules more flexible, and it handles swaps when your plans change.

It reads availability from your calendar: Out of Office events, or any
event whose title or description includes a tag such as 'no-oncall' or
'prefer-oncall'.

It uses that availability to assign shifts on a rolling basis, so on-call
fits around your other commitments.

The rollout is staged over the next few months. You'll get detailed
instructions when it's time to move your schedule.

For more information on On-Call Optimizer visit https://oncall-optimizer.com/

Phase 1: Create a schedule catalog

• Build a catalog of schedules in-scope for integration with On-Call Optimizer.
• From your existing on-call product, collect a list of all schedules in-use and their important properties:
  • Shift and escalation pattern (e.g. daily, weekly, business-hours only, shifts etc)
  • Roles required (e.g. single assignee, or primary/secondary assignees)
  • Number of people participating in the schedule
    • Do they belong to a single team?
    • Are they in a single time zone, or distributed across geographies?
    • Do all members have the same assignment criteria and availability?
  • Does the schedule depend on any other schedules, or the availability of other teams?

Phase 2: Pilot

From the schedule catalog, select one or two schedules that meet the following criteria:

• Staffed by members of a single team, in a single time-zone.
• Have between 3 - 8 members.
  • The exact size matters less than this: small enough that the team can coordinate, and large enough that flexible scheduling is worth it.
• Use a shift pattern matching one of the schedule templates (Daily, Weekly, Business hours only, or Business and after-hours), which match the first few simpler example configurations.
• Do not have complex dependencies or rely on the schedules of other teams.

For each pilot schedule, work through the Integrate an existing schedule guide.

Phase 3: Simple schedules

• Identify the remaining schedules in your catalog that meet the pilot criteria.
• For each schedule, work through the Integrate an existing schedule guide.
• Group schedules that should start on the same date. That makes it clearer when each team changes how it operates.

Phase 4: Complex schedules

Schedules with more complex shift patterns, or that need assignment groups, are easier to integrate once the organization has used On-Call Optimizer for a while.

• The example configurations show how to set up nested schedules and teams spread across time zones.
• Create a temporary schedule and use New assignment on the schedule page to try combinations of shift patterns, assignment groups and nesting before you commit to one.

Phase 5: Cross-team schedules

Integrate schedules that need cross-schedule availability last, after the schedules they depend on are integrated and running steadily.

Tips:

• Use as few source schedules as you can for any one schedule.
• Don’t source one member’s availability from schedules that use different actions.
  • For example, don’t block from schedule A and prefer from schedule B when the same people are assigned on both. If they are on call for A and B at the same time, the two sources disagree.