----- Original Message ----- > On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 08:51:03AM -0600, Elijah Wright wrote: > > We use Friday at noon to Monday noon for weekend coverage. > > > > We stopped using weeklong oncall shifts last year and went to daily > > rotation (we use pagerduty to organize this). It's far less > > draining, and > > it encouraged us to get better about ticketing issues to smooth > > handoff. > > Oh man, that sounds pretty great. How did it work out? >
Yeah, it does sound neat.... We tried to eliminate oncall schedule. Just have everybody dialed in, when they are available, and who ever gets the call...gets it. The problem is Operations is very set in its procedures, and wouldn't go for it. (though it was officially announced that they're about to get reorged -- Since the mainframe went away, their role has changed....actually its been largely undefined for the last couple of years. They've mentioned that they are soliciting input on what their role should be now.) And, there are some people that wouldn't be reachable if they didn't have to be. Even if they are the only one that knows anything about the system that is down. Plus the whole accrual of borrowed time might be an issue..... People (most of which don't work here anymore) owe me a lot of time, for me covering their oncall... Its always always been that the oncall person isn't responsible for solving every problem...and that others can get called if needed. The oncall person is just the first contact for our group. Again, some of my co-workers still don't get this. I also thought that as I become more senior around here..that I might actually be able to take holidays off from being on call. Guess I need to stop being the single one. Though in some ways...we are approaching everybody is on call.... If we were fully staffed...there would be 10(or 11) people.... The most we had ever been, that I recall, is 8. With the 7 salaried people in the on call schedule. As I recall, there had been 4 regular, 1 senior and 1 e-mail position. I was one of the 3 hired into the regular. I think the senior was a bait&switch...the manager back then did a lot of weird things (she was put on terminal contract and removed as manager, they offered to put her under the new manager...but he didn't want her, and the strange tickets that she puts in...we often wonder if she ever knew any unix administration.) Plus the regular positions weren't advertised. They interviewed a bunch of people for the senior...and only made offers of the regular. Won't happen now, because we are know as the group that enforces policies.... ....where was I going...oh....we're down to just 4 people now. The new guy (formerly our student), my manager, the backup administrator....and me. Boss says if I were to leave the University would have to go out of business. Not sure where we are on funded positions now....I think we could go to 7 or 8. (one position was funded by the library, they fired our admin and hired their own.... the e-mail position was eliminated before we outsourced, so I admin all the e-mail systems now...except listserv. And, one position was classified. He took early retirement and the responsibilities went to the more appropriate department.) While former manager was still occupying the manager contract, they couldn't give the new manager the contract. But, now that he's on the manager contract...shouldn't that free up his senior admin contract? Anyways...I should figure out what's up with my phone before my oncall week starts tomorrow.... _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
