On-Call Configuration and Maintenance

Part Two: Creating and Maintaining Your On-call Schedule

NOTE: Functionality described in this document is limited-access, and not everyone has been assigned the necessary role to use it. If you are designated to maintain On-call for your group and the screens you access look different for you, please contact the System Admins.

I: Terminology...... 1 A. Rota: The container for an On-call schedule...... 1 B. Roster: The container for who is on call and for the rotation sequence...... 1 II: On-call Options: What choices we can offer for On-call...... 2 For all options, we can also page the Manager or Group Lead one time (no repeats) after the Primary and Backup have been paged...... 2 A. Simple Weekly On-call (Backup always next-in-rotation from Primary)...... 2 B. Weekly On-call with Primary and Backup on distinct rotations...... 2 C. Split-day On-call (2 or more distinct call periods per day)...... 2 D. Partial-weekly On-call in either of the formats above...... 2 E. "Daily" On-call (with some complexities)...... 2 III: Providing spot-coverage for On-call...... 3 A. Creating spot-coverage for On-call using the On-call Calendar:...... 3 B. Modifying spot-coverage for On-call using the On-call Calendar:...... 3

I: Terminology A. Rota: The container for an On-call schedule. 1. A Rota defines the span of time for which call is covered. 2. If you intend to have different Business-Hours versus After-Hours call coverage schedules, or to split your call coverage by hours of the day in a different way (e.g. midnight-to-noon and noon-to-midnight), then you may need more than one Rota. 3. If you want to rotate call on a daily basis instead of weekly, or in fractions of a week, then you will also need more than one Rota. True daily rotations don't work due to bugs in Service-Now's On-call Plugin; however, we can create an approximation of one by using several different "weekday" Rotas which change call every week (Monday night Rota, Tuesday night Rota, Wednesday night Rota, …). 4. Rota maintenance is not covered in this document; it is quite complex and rarely needed after initial setup. If you want to change the basis for your group's Rota or create split Rotas for different times, please contact the System Admins for help. B. Roster: The container for who is on call and for the rotation sequence. 1. Each group should have at least a Primary roster. Many groups will also need a Backup roster; see "On-call Options", below, to determine whether or not you do. 2. Your rosters do not have to contain all team members. By default they will, but you can remove team members from the list for any roster; Desktop, for example, has totally different Roster memberships for Primary versus for Backup. 3. The Primary roster is who gets paged first. It is possible to page more than one person in the sequence from the Primary roster, so that effectively whoever would be next on- call becomes automatically the Backup on call; this is the simplest "On-call Option". 4. The Backup roster is who gets paged after the Primary roster's pages are complete. II: On-call Options: What choices we can offer for On-call Although Berlin made some improvements, there are still some significant bugs in the On-call Plugin for Service-Now, and because it’s written mostly in closed-source Java code without adequate API documentation (by a third party) we can’t fix these issues ourselves. For now, we have arrived at several options which provide reasonable flexibility while working around these bugs.

For all options, we can also page the Manager or Group Lead after the Primary and Backup have been paged, if that is desirable.

A. Simple Weekly On-call (Backup always next-in-rotation from Primary) 1. The simplest option is a weekly (or every N weeks, if you like) rotation, with the Secondary automatically being whoever would be next in the rotation. 2. This has 2 significant limitations: a. When you do a spot-override to provide coverage for the Primary, you're not just overriding the Primary; you're also overriding the Secondary. What happens is that during the spot-coverage period, the rotation gets moved to the point in the cycle where the covering person would be on Primary call; therefore, whoever would be next on call after the person covering Primary is on Secondary call. b. For the same reason, you cannot do a spot-override for Secondary except by overriding Primary call. B. Weekly On-call with Primary and Backup on distinct rotations 1. This is the next-simplest option, suitable for teams who either have a separate roster for Backup or want the group lead or manager to be on Backup call with repeat pages. 2. It is possible to separately override the Primary and the Backup on-call. C. Split-day On-call (2 or more distinct call periods per day) 1. We can split the day to put one person on call for the first part of the day and someone else on call for the second part of the day. 2. We can also do this without putting anyone on call for a certain segment of the day; for example, some teams are not on call from midnight to 8 AM, so we could establish a Rota which only covers 8 AM to midnight each day and rotates on-call every week. 3. We can do a "Workday On-call" with separate coverage for nights and weekends. D. Partial-weekly On-call in either of the formats above 1. We can split the week by providing a Rota covering certain days and a Rota covering certain other days; for example, Monday-through-Friday and Friday-through-Monday. E. "Daily" On-call (with some complexities) 1. The built-in Daily rotation option has a serious problems: it only works if you change call at midnight. If you attempt to change call at any other time, it stops after one cycle instead of repeating the roster. 2. Instead of using this broken mechanism, we can create separate Rotas for Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, etc. The Weekend can either be 3 separate nights or else a single "night" if you prefer. 3. What you get will not actually be a daily rotation, but rather a weekly rotation for who is on call each night, with the nights staggered. If your team has at least as many members as the number of "nights" per week, we can guarantee that nobody will be on call 2 "nights" in a row and that over a number of weeks equal to the size of your team, everyone will work a given "night" the same number of times. However, the sequence of call from day to day may not always be the same unless your team's size exactly matches the number of "nights" into which you divide the week. III: Providing spot-coverage for On-call A. Creating spot-coverage for On-call using the On-call Calendar: 1. In the "On-call Rotation" application, click "On-call Calendars". 2. At the left just above the calendar is a Group pulldown; select your Group there. 3. At the right above the calendar are navigation controls which let you control the display (Month, Week, Day – default is Week) and move forward or backward. a. Be sure you're on the Week view. Don't ever do spot-coverage from the Month view; doing so may create a coverage entry for 1899 which will be very difficult to find and edit or delete. 4. Navigate to the appropriate week, then double-click in the white area under the Day you want to edit, at approximately the hour when you the override to start. 5. The "Add Item" window will pop up. Verify (or set) its information as follows: a. Check that the date is correct; however, don't worry about the time – you'll edit that later. b. The selected option should be "Provide on-call coverage for another roster member. c. The "Member" pulldown should be the name of the person who will be covering call (not the name of the person who will be covered for). d. The "Roster" should be your Primary or Secondary roster, depending on which the person is covering. e. Remember that in the "Simple Weekly On-call" option, there is no way to separately cover for Primary or Secondary; you can cover for the Primary on-call person, but this automatically makes that person's normal Secondary be the Secondary for this coverage period. f. Do not select "Specify extra times" or "Schedule time off" without consulting a System Admin. g. When you've verified the settings, click OK. 6. Locate the new tiny calendar icon containing a blue circle with a white "i" in it. It will appear at the top left of a new coverage span which interrupts the specified roster (Primary or Backup) on that date on the Calendar (screen cap at right): 7. Double-click that icon, to pull up the new Coverage span and edit it: a. A "Dialog" window will appear; examine the data but don't change anything yet. b. If you discover that you made a mistake (for example, if you meant to override the Primary roster but instead overrode the Backup roster), click "Delete". Please do not try to correct the error using this screen – simply "Delete" and recreate. c. The only fields on this screen which you should ever edit are the boxes to the right of the label "When". If you need to change anything else, delete it and then create a new coverage entry; see below for how to do that. d. In the "When" boxes, edit the start and end time; if the end time is on the following day (after midnight), then you must also edit the end date. e. Click "Update" to save your change. 8. Verify on the Calendar that your spot-coverage now reflects the correct time span. B. Modifying spot-coverage for On-call using the On-call Calendar: 1. Modifying coverage is unfortunately more tedious than creating it. Creating a coverage entry automatically overrides the specified roster; however, creating a second coverage entry for the same time period does not override any coverage entry which it overlaps. 2. Find the spot-coverage entry which you need to change, and double-click its "Calendar with the blue circle and 'i'" mini-icon. 3. There are 3 possible change scenarios to consider; the first is Deletion: a. If you simply want to remove the spot-coverage, click the "Delete" button, close the list which appears, then click “On-Call Calendar” again in the Navigation pane at the left and choose your group once more. 4. The second is a Split (have someone else cover either the beginning or the end of the existing entry): a. Go to the "When" row and adjust the Start Time and End Time (and if necessary the Start Date and/or End Date) to make the current spot-coverage entry span only the time when you want the current spot- coverage person to be on call. b. Click "Update" to save the entry, and you will find that the original Roster has filled in the gap. c. You can now create a new spot-coverage entry to fill in the additional time from the original entry with a different person. 5. The third is an Insert (have someone else cover the middle of the existing entry): a. Follow the steps for "Split" (above). b. When you complete step "c", however, go back and repeat step "c" to fill in the extra span from before of after the Inserted coverage. For example, if Tamara had been set to cover for Wendy from 8 AM to 5 PM, and you need Angela to cover for Tamara from 1 PM to 3 PM: i. Change the entry for Tamara's coverage to run from 8 AM to 1 PM instead of to 5 PM. ii. Create an entry for Angela to cover from 1 PM to 3 PM. iii. Create an other entry for Tamara to cover from 3 PM to 5 PM.