Aligning on-call across teams

[Seth Esterline]

I have a scheduling situation that I can't find a clear answer for.  We have several teams, each with their own on-call schedule currently.  Some users are members of more than 1 team.  We'd like to line their on-call schedule up so if they're on-call for 1 team, that's the week they're on-call for the other team they're a member of; we're trying to eliminate personA being oncall for Team1 this week and oncall for Team2 next week, essentially.

My best thought right now is to make a new schedule and include all the teams' schedules as rotations rather than their own separate schedule; that lets me see them all in one place and try to get people's oncalls lined up.  BUT each team doesn't have the same number of users so it'll always drift over time.  My best solution for *that* is to pad the difference by adding the team to the rotation(the thought being that, say, every 6th spot in the rotation is filled by 1 person from that team in order); but I'm not sure what happens if I add a team to an oncall rotation; does it notify the whole team?  Does it use that team's oncall as a sub-rotation?

I'd love to know the cleanest and most scalable way to do this so we aren't manually checking every quarter for the next quarter to line things up across each team's calendar.

[Samir]

Hi @Seth Esterline !

So it sounds like the main thing you're looking for is for whenever a person is on-call in 1 schedule, they are on-call in the other schedules at the same time. There isn't really a simple way to achieve this, especially since you mentioned that each schedule doesn't have the same number of participants.

I don't think the option of having 1 schedule, with each team having their own rotation would work. As when alert notifies a schedule, anyone who is on-call in any rotations in that schedule would be notified. So in that case whoever is on-call in TeamA, would be getting notified for alerts that are intended for TeamB for example. 

I think the best way to see what can be done here would be if you could reach out to support via the in-app chat (if on a paid plan), or via support.atlassian.com - that way one of our Support Engineers can access to your account to see how you have your schedules/teams configured.