Overview
On-call schedules that fit around team member’s other commitments.
Flexible on-call schedules are the foundation for on-call to become a practice that grows expertise across the team.
How does it work?
Each member of the on-call schedule connects their calendar.
On-Call Optimizer looks for matching events and turns them into availability information:
blocks (times they cannot be on call) and preferences (times they would like to be on call).
Each member’s availability is combined with the schedule’s shifts and a constraint optimization algorithm runs to build an assignment. The assignment fits around the existing commitments in each person’s life and honours as many preferences as it can.
The schedule is then exported to your on-call product (for example PagerDuty) and can be shown in any calendar app through a calendar feed.
Benefits
Most on-call tools rotate people in a fixed order. On-Call Optimizer fits shifts around each person’s other commitments, so the schedule affects their life as little as possible. It also gives you:
- One place for availability. Members keep their on-call availability in the calendar they already use for the rest of their time.
- Straightforward changes and swaps. In addition to facilitating swaps of two shifts, a shift can simply be taken and if that leaves the load uneven, the next assignment evens it out.
Getting started
Start with one of these guides:
- Create a schedule from a template
- Integrate a schedule from your existing on-call product
- Share your calendar with an on-call schedule
Just been invited by your team? Open Home in On-Call Optimizer and click Connect your calendar. See Connect a calendar for details.