Most IT organizations have processes that run outside of standard business hours, namely nights and/or weekends. In most cases, if these nightly or weekend processes fail, people within IT must get involved to fix it. This raises the question of who on your staff gets called at 2:00 in the morning or on Sunday afternoon when these failures occur.

To answer this question, most companies create an on-call rotation schedule which rotates who is on-call. This is generally done on either a daily or weekly basis. For example, if there are five people in your group, including yourself, you are each on call once every five weeks for a one week period.
The truth is that no one really likes to be on call; however, people are generally willing to tolerate it under the following circumstances:

1. They think the rotation schedule is fairly distributed and they are not being treated unfairly

2. The nightly and weekend processes are fairly stable and generally run without human intervention

3. They have the skill to correct problems that arise or know who to call for backup if they can not fix the problem themselves

4. If the rotation is not too disruptive to their personal/family life

Posted On Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 6:00 am | Filed under Uncategorized |