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Weekday CEOC Rotation Update: Introducing 4-Hour Primary Shifts and New Secondary Rotation - [EMEA]

Weekday CEOC Rotation iteration

This is the next iteration in our approach to the customer emergency rotation. As these changes have been discussed for a long time and across several issues, this summary aims to provide a concise overview of what will change.

  • Note that all this only affects the weekday rotation.
  • Nothing changes on weekends at this time.

Starting 2024-11-01, we will:

  • Split the current rotation from one 8h block into two 4h blocks
  • Add a new secondary CEOC rotation

4-hour blocks for primary rotation

Most people on the rotation have already experimented with this via manual overrides and consider it an improvement. To avoid scheduling overhead, the 4-hour model will become the default. Instead of one 8-hour block per cycle, you'll now have two 4-hour shifts. One in the morning and one in the afternoon.

With the shift to 4-hour blocks and adding a secondary shift, we had a tough time accommodating everyone’s requests when setting up the schedules. We want to give you as much flexibility as possible while iterating on a better way to build these quarterly shifts. In the meanwhile:

  • People who desire a single 8-hour block can arrange that by changing shifts with others.
  • We don’t mind if you manage your shifts back to back (or in any other format)—as long as you find the right people to exchange with, feel free to submit your overrides in PD.
  • If you struggle to find coverage due to an extraordinary situation, please DM your manager or the SMOC, and we will do our best to accommodate the request.
    • We are considering further iterations to allow for more flexibility.

Secondary rotation

The new secondary rotation is one 8-hour block. Currently, it is scheduled for the day after you've been “primary on-call” in the morning.

  • There is no hard requirement for this to be so; it was only done for convenience.
  • We only ask that you don’t schedule your secondary shifts on top of a day where you are on a primary shift.

The goal of this change is to address concurrent emergencies happening more frequently.

  • When you're secondary on-call, you are first in line to respond to concurrent emergencies. For technical reasons, both primary and secondary will be paged for all incoming emergencies – but as long as there are no concurrent emergencies, it is the primary on-call's responsibility to respond.

Next steps

  • Please check both PagerDuty schedules linked above for when you're on-call between November and February.
  • Use this issue for questions and feedback.
  • Please open a new issue for concrete iteration suggestions building on these changes.

Thank you, @cnightingale, @bnyaringita & @manuelgrabowski, for opening the original issues & driving the conversations in the team. And thank you, @kategrechishkina, for your continued efforts in working with Ops to make all this work smoothly!

Edited by Ilia Kosenko