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> If there’s actually best-practices here that help that we’re not already doing... Unless you have a leadership that recognizes the time sink on-call generate
by yourapostasy 5y ago
> If there’s actually best-practices here that help that we’re not already doing...
Unless you have a leadership that recognizes the time sink on-call generates, all the best practices in the world are not going to help. This goes back to leadership culture. If they aren't in the trenches taking the same rotations with the on-call staff and at least simply staying up with them when the calls come in, then they will need metrics they believe to understand the deleterious effects of excessive on-call. This doesn't even begin to touch upon excessive on-call environments strongly signalling ignored technical and/or product debt that drags down new feature implementation and innovation. Leadership that truly comprehends this will allocate significant (20-25%) of time to addressing it, and push back on feature demands.
If you get to that point, then 80% of your struggle is over. Once you have leadership backing bringing the necessary time and resources to bear, reducing on-call is mostly lots of bookkeeping and documentation to identify trends and commonalities to prioritize and fix. A lot of the specific implementation details depend upon what you have available to leverage; ideally put someone in the PM role of tracking details for weekly stand-ups who is a relentless detailed note-taker and follow-upper.