Aligning the pain with the people who can solve it is the first rule of getting things done. Make the developers who will have to take on the bus-factor workloa

Aligning the pain with the people who can solve it is the first rule of getting things done. Make the developers who will have to take on the bus-factor workload realize what the bus factor is, and they'll figure out how to reduce their dependencies real quickly. Another good take on this is the "Wheel of Misfortune"; Take a real incident (or synthesize one in testing) that paged someone inconveniently. They've already solved it - They're running the exercise. Now have everyone else on the team, individually or as a group, figure out how to solve it. Not from the debugging steps or postmortem of the incident, but before that's been shared - Have them all suggest what they'd look for, and how to fix it. Their most important resource is their instructor/adversary for this, so give them all the data, but no map to it. Further, have the instructor figure out how to respond to all the unknowns - What else was broken because of the incident? What would have happend if they tried different debugging steps? Builds team knowledge real fast.