SGG: Per-region Slack handles to easily ping a specific set of team members for Ginkgo group
Problem Statement
There are no region-and-group-specific Slack groups/handles.
What is the problem?
We don't have an easy way to ping all team members that are in both a specific Support Global Group and region, for example @spt-ginkgo-emea or @spt-pine-apac.
Why is this a problem?
There's situations where quickly being able to ping this specific subset of team members would be very useful. Pinging individual people is clunky and takes time. Even after months in my SGG, I'd still have to look up the exact list to be sure. The message also get's needlessly verbose, and I might have to explain "I am pinging all of you as you're the EMEA Ginkgo members", whereas an explicit handle already carries that meaning in the name, allowing for more effiecient communication.
Examples for situations where it would be handy:
- We observe a possible/upcoming breach in the queue and want to inform the rest of the SGG who are (most likely) currently working. (As a workaround we already added guidance to enable all notifications for our own SGG channel, but this shouldn't be necessary.
- We want to inform a specific shift/region about a ticket they should be aware of. We're currently sometimes using scheduled messages as a workaround to make the message appear as new during these working hours, but a ping would be more in line with how Slack is supposed to work.
Proposal
I suggest creating Slack groups for each $SGG x $region combination. The information is available in the support-team.yml, so hopefully an automated solution could be found – that way no manual upkeep would be required when group membership changes.
DRI
I will act as the DRI for this issue.
Required Resources
Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider
I think I remember prior discussion about this, and that it's unfortunately not that easy to create groups? I'm not sure about the details anymore, I think the problem is that Support Ops doesn't control Slack and needs IT to create the groups, so automation would not really be possible, and doing it manually is obviously not an option.
Desired Outcome
What does success look like?
Every $SGG x $region combination can effortlessly be pinged in Slack.
How do we measure success?
I guess we could track the Slack message count where the handles are used. Just the daily checkin reminders alone would create three usages per day and group, though.
Where would future feedback go?
In follow-up issues, possibly after first being discussed in the SGG sync feedback sessions. (This comes out of one such session as well.)