When incidents happen, protecting customer experience and minimizing downtime starts with bringing the right subject matter experts in to fix the problem. For many organizations tackling agile methodologies, embracing service ownership (you build it, you own it) into the incident response process is key to success. However, this cultural transformation to putting developers on-call for their services in production is no small feat. Having the right platform to assign responders with dedicated on-call schedules that can mobilize the right people at the right time when seconds matter makes all the difference. 

As the best-in-class solution for incident response, the PagerDuty scheduling experience  continues to be a focus area for ongoing iteration to ensure that the customer workflow is as seamless as possible.

Therefore, we’re proud to launch a number of highly requested updates to scheduling. Highlights include the ability to rename layers and manage users associated with a schedule. Keep reading to learn all the details.

Consolidated Schedule View

The new schedule details page brings the most relevant information about each schedule front and center. This way, both on-call users and admins / team managers can quickly get an overview of current and upcoming rotations. Here are the details you can easily see on this page: 

• Who’s on call
• Who will be next on call
• Calendar feeds
• Collapsible menus to check which users, teams and escalation policies are associated with the schedule

Dynamic Schedule Creation

By listening to our customers feedback on usability, we were able to design a more fluid and dynamic schedule creation experience. New capabilities include:

• Mandatory schedule names: every new schedule created requires a name to give teams more clarity about the existing schedules – both users and team managers / admins. 
• Dropdown time picker: instead of manually typing a handoff time, you can now use a time picker, also available when adding restrictions to a schedule.
• Relocated buttons: the cancel and save buttons are now on the right hand side of the page and they follow the user’s page scroll, making them easier to find.

Flexible Editing

More than ever, change is the only constant for organizations and their teams. So it’s important that their schedules can quickly be adapted to reflect their current structure and process. Check these three new functionalities that improve schedule editing:

• Manage teams associated with a schedule: admins can now add or remove teams directly from a schedule.
• Change a schedule layer’s name: users and admins can edit a schedule layer’s name to give it a more descriptive title and adjust it in a way that makes more sense to the organization – it even supports emojis. E.g.: You can create an East Coast layer and a West Coast layer. 
• Reorder and collapse schedule layers: the new drag and drop functionality allows users to reorder layers easily in both the schedule layer creation and editing pages.
  

Deep Dive on the New Scheduling Experience

Want to see these new capabilities in action? Watch the below video where Senior Product Manager Kara Smith joins Developer Advocate Mandi Walls to show off all the scheduling UI enhancements.

We’ve launched these updates to make the scheduling experience easier, but we’re not stopping there. Stay tuned on how we’re continuing to build out the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to help scale teams with the power of AI and automation to transform the entire incident management process. Try for yourself with our free 14-day trial. 

The post 3 New Updates to the PagerDuty Scheduling Experience appeared first on PagerDuty.

Small issues are usually an early warning sign of more serious problems. If they’re fixed as soon as they arise, bigger problems can be avoided in the long run and your team and customers stay happy.

So, how do we get proactive and make fixing operational problems a habit? Empowering the team with effective on-call handoff sessions is a great place to start!

When our on-call team members go off duty and hand the baton to their teammates, we use this time to expose operational problems, discuss solutions, and empower the team to initiate action. Here are a few tips for effective on-call handoff sessions based on my experience of being on-call at a number of companies, including PagerDuty.

1. Make On-Call Handoffs a Ritual

It’s easy to miss problems engineers are facing when they’re on-call if the team only talks about operational problems in engineering chat rooms. We have regular, dedicated handoff sessions to encourage reflection and create a bias for proactive action to address root cause. Our schedules usually change once a week so the meeting coincides with the day of the changeover. The frequency of handoffs will usually follow how quickly your on-call rotation schedule changes and can vary by organization and team.

2. Increase Empathy by Inviting Non-Engineers

Being on-call and waking up to incidents can be disruptive and stressful. We include other stakeholders in the on-call handoff meeting to build a sense of camaraderie and empathy, which ultimately leads to better decision making across the organization.

Our product managers benefit from understanding the impact of operational pain on engineers and customers. Exposure to hand-off sessions allows PMs to hear the impact of their prioritization decisions and ensure both product and technical initiatives are moved forward during work planning sessions.

The goal of engineering leaders is to foster a team culture where individuals are happy, motivated, creative and engaged. By observing on-call handoff sessions and carefully listening to concerns, people managers get exposure to insights that may not be uncovered in team/one-on-one meetings. Following the session, leaders can take action to provide support and resources. Encouraging engineers to take well-deserved time off or helping prioritize the team’s technical/operational recommendations are two examples.

3. Embrace Observability by Reviewing Metrics During the Handoff

It’s easy for teams to get accustomed to disruption when it builds up gradually over time; especially if no one is taking a holistic view and noticing worrying patterns. By reviewing metrics during the handoff session, a culture of observability is promoted that allows the team to see the true picture of operational health — both infrastructural health and human health.

Here are metrics and tools we’ve found useful during our handoff sessions:

Team disruption statistics: PagerDuty provides valuable data and graphs showing total incidents by service, team, and user. Comparing counts at each review allows us to reflect on patterns and discuss solutions.

Chat history: By using chat integration (Slack, Hipchat etc.), all incident notifications can be sent to a dedicated channel. Our engineers chat in the same channel as the incident notifications so it’s easy to identify and analyze conversation threads showing trending topics and concerns.

Use PagerDuty’s Public APIs to create custom reports and apps: Using PagerDuty’s APIs supports the creation of reports and apps that can be tailored to your business. For example, we’ve created an extension that gives an instant picture of how much out-of-hours disruption the on-call team members have had based on the time of day and frequency of high-priority incidents. By sharing this view across the team in the handoff session, we see a picture of team health that motivates us to take action.

4. Take Action to Improve

Create tasks, experiment, review, and adjust

Areas of concern that are uncovered during the on-call hand-off sessions must be followed up with concrete actions. PagerDuty’s Jira integration makes it easy to quickly track unplanned work from right inside an incident. It’s then just a short step to assign this work to the on-call engineer (see next section “Reinforce expectations for on-call duties” to understand how this works).

If improvements are noted and correlated back to concrete actions, it’s much more likely those improvements will happen.

Remember to review the result of changes in subsequent on-call handover sessions and adjust your approach based on what was learned.

5. Reinforce Expectations for On-Call Best Practice

Many teams fall into the trap of failing to set clear expectations of on-call and see it as just ‘part of the job’ rather than a dedicated, critical role. How can you stay out of this trap? We set clear expectations:

1. During their on-call shift, engineers will dedicate time to investigating and fixing the root cause of operational problems as a priority.
2. Picking up new feature work should be a luxury, not an expectation.
3. After a disruptive night or weekend, on-call engineers are expected to take a break and have time to recover.

At the on-call handover session, it’s important to check in on these expectations and reinforce the message: Operational improvement requires effort: humans need time and space to be able to focus on it. They also need downtime and a workload that is sustainable.

For more advice on best practice for being on-call, check out our On-Call Survival Guide.

Having engineers on-call is an effective way to encourage continuous improvement and system stability. However, it only works if everyone in the organization understands how to play their part in making it successful. Even if you are not an engineer, your decisions are likely to have unintended side effects on the well-being of engineers and the systems they’re building. Getting involved in on-call handoff sessions and encouraging proactive resolution of problems leads to happy teams and successful products. I encourage you to look at your own organization and reflect on ways you can build empathy across teams using similar techniques. Share your ideas and suggestions in our Community forum!

The post 5 Ways to Improve Team Health With Effective On-Call Handoffs appeared first on PagerDuty.

We’ve heard from many of our customers that making changes to scheduling is challenging at times; undoing changes, trying to figure out what was changed or who modified the schedule last requires time. Reviewing, updating and reverting back to an older schedule should be an easy, effortless process.

Today, PagerDuty is excited to launch a powerful new addition to Schedules – the ability to revert recent schedule changes!

On May 20th, we started capturing snapshots each time a schedule layer change was saved. A snapshot contains the information in each of your schedule layers (who’s in the rotation, hand-off times), as well as the date that the schedule was modified and the period for which the schedule was active. With the click of a button, you can now revert your schedule and one of your last ten snapshots can be made active again.

We’ve made it easy to get started: If you’ve made changes to your schedules since May 20th, you’ll be able to see the changes and revert to a previous version of your schedules immediately!

How to Revert to an Older Schedule

In the Schedules interface, you’ll see a new button in the upper-right corner labelled “Revert this Schedule.” Selecting it will show you a drop down menu containing the last ten schedule changes. If you have made fewer than ten changes since May 20th, the drop down will contain fewer snapshots.

When you select a snapshot, you’ll be dropped into the edit view. You can make further adjustments or simply save it, making the selected snapshot your active schedule again.

Note: if there are any deleted users in the schedule snapshot, you’ll be notified before the changes are saved.

Head over to your account to start using this feature, our checkout the knowledge-base article for more information.

We’d love to hear what you think about this new feature, including any suggested improvements you might have. Drop our support team a line at support@pagerduty.com if you’d like to get in touch.

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