Comment I'm doing on call right now actually (Score 2) 249

by CrunkCreeper on Thursday November 17, 2011 @10:49PM (#38094142) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Tools To Aid When "On Call"?

I actually started on call tonight. While it's not an ideal thing to do, it can be managed. Our company gives on call duty to a person once a week. Here are some things that have seemed to help:
* Start on call in the middle of the week.
* We always have a secondary on call person, and we're encouraged to work things out with the secondary person in case we want to go to a movie or something.
* If we get called a lot, we're not expected to be at work the next day, which really helps out.
* One beer (one, not two or three) before sleep helps to take the anxious edge off sometimes.
* Log into the important things you need to be in and keep your computer on overnight. The likelihood of someone breaking into my house and knowing how to do anything useful/detrimental on the VPN is very slim.
* Track every call you get and review them in the on call "hand-off meeting". This seems to help reduce reoccurring issues. Keep a spreadsheet with these calls and append a sheet to it every on call session, and review it.
* The hand-off meeting should involve the previous primary and secondary and the primary and secondary people going on call, as well as someone else who sits in on all meetings to see trends.
* Compensate the person for doing on call for the specific time being on call (ie. not rolled into the the salary by default).
* Let people know if you're going to be in the next day, when you'll be in if you're going to be late, and tell them the reasoning (ie. got called 3 times last night at 2 hour intervals). This seems to help better in team situations.
* Leave work in time for you to be home before the first potential calls.
* Give the on call person one of those 3/4G wifi things in case they are at a place without Internet.

Ideally though we would have someone staffed at work 24/7 who could fix these issues. Maybe one of these days.

Submission + - Solutions For More Community At Work? 1

Submitted by CrunkCreeper on Friday January 29, 2010 @01:35PM

CrunkCreeper writes: I work at a tier 2 hosting company (SAP, web servers, Citrix, databases, etc.). I started working at this location 2 years ago in January. The company had anywhere from 20-30 other employees, and now we are just over 100. People with all different IT experience are employed. At one end of the spectrum, you have accounting, billing, and sales. At the other end you have the helpdesk, analysts, and engineers. In the past we were hiring mainly people in their 20's, and now we're hiring more senior people in their 30's and 40's. Incidentally with our expanded demographic and recently aggressive hiring, people are not as familiar with each other as they used to be. This happens to some extent and will continue to happen more the larger our company grows, but I would like to curb the corporate feel a bit. I'm trying to bring family or community feel back to the company. The reason for this need is that great ideas are normally discussed in non-formal environments. Beside this fact, I want people to genuinely have more fun and decrease the sometimes uncomfortable discussions with "that guy" from "that department". Being an IT company, I find it more natural for collaboration via computer, but welcome more traditional methods too.

To save some of you from reading, here's the question: How does your company keep or build a community environment using technology?

Here is what we currently use for collaboration, both formal and non-formal:
IRC — We have used a dedicated IRC server from the start, and it helps out tremendously when people use it (the linux folks use it heavily), but it doesn't entice a vast majority of the employees. It's used mainly for BS'ing, but also becomes a very important tool when things are awry.

Facebook — Most people are on Facebook, but obviously there are details about the company that cannot be discussed, which is an issue since most of these profiles are public and it is a somewhat common practice to be friends with some clients.

Exchange 2007 — E-mail is the main source of communication, but can't it be painful sometimes? Everyone on the IT side receives alerts about tickets and other automated checks of systems. On any given day I generally receive 100+ alert messages. When we're not reading our filtered alerts into specified folders, general discussion about projects and fixing issues usually is anywhere from 20-60 messages a day. Quite honestly, I'm sick of e-mail and don't wish to get any more of it. I know a lot of you feel the same way.

Phone — Just using the ol' phone is the other primary way of communicating with the customer, but not ideal for communicating ideas with others at the same time. We have bridges, but they're only used for conferences with customers.

Company Meetings — We have these a few times a year. They're fully catered and consist of introducing the new people, talking about new contracts, and congratulating others on successful implementations . These generally last about an hour or so at the end of the workday. Unfortunately dedicating to these meetings is not the easiest on people's schedules, especially the helpdesk, and is not an open forum.

There are forms of collaboration that I have been thinking of. To list some, there is phpBB, Elgg, Jabber (discussed a few times before), and Google Wave (hard to push currently). Personally I think that a closed social networking platform would be ideal, where ideas can be posted and read at any time. Tell me what you think of these ideas, if there are more suitable solutions, or what you use at work.

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