On Oct 2, Jamie Rishaw <jamie@arpa.com> wrote:
We're in the process of developing a 24x7 NOC, and can agree upon about everything except scheduling.
We have a few ideas, all of which have really bad downsides:
- 4day, 10hour rotation. 2-hour overlap. - Downside is overlap, and the fact that nobody will have a regular schedule.. they'll be M-Th, then T-Fr, W-Sa, Th-Su, Fr-Mo.. bleh.
I understand AGIS used to do that. AFAIK, the two (yes, two) people they had on that rotation quit long ago.
- M-F 9-hour shifts, Sa-Su 2x12-hour shifts - Downside is the Sa-Su people are just "extras".
You're gonna want good people on weekends, 'cause it's harder to find a clueful telco person during non-business hours.
- Su-We, We-Sa 10-hour shifts. Alleviates "skewing" schedules one day every week, but creates a 14.5% labor increase on Wednesday when you have a complete overlap.
You're probably gonna have overlap at some point; either that or have somebody working extra hours every week.
Anyhow,, we're looking for information on how other NOCs around the world do it. We're trying to give good coverage without killing/burning out the NOC team members.
Can't be done. *grin* At a previous job, we had eight-hour shifts, no formal overlap; for quite a while we'd have one person in the NOC at any given time. Each week, one of us would work six days. There wasn't any overtime. It's a good thing we all liked working there; in fact, once we stopped enjoying the job everybody who was in the NOC at that time quit. What I'm trying at Priori is four-hour shifts. People can work eight or sometimes even twelve hours in a row if they want, but it's all in four-hour blocks. Since we're expecting that at least some of our part-timers will be students, that gives us a lot of flexibility to deal with their schedules. We don't yet have all the shifts covered, so Justin, Michael, and myself are covering as needed, and I don't yet have a good feeling as to how well this is going to work. Luckily, since we're a startup, it won't be too hard to move to something else as needed. The most important thing, IMHO, is to make sure that the schedule you have set is something that your staff can live with -- at that previous job I mentioned we were all completely insane and actually didn't mind working a couple day shifts, having a day and a half off, and then coming in for night shifts, and rotating that around every couple of weeks -- except for one full-time student, we preferred that to being stuck with the same hours every day of every week. ********************************************************* J.D. Falk voice: +1-650-482-2840 Supervisor, Network Operations fax: +1-650-482-2844 PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net "The People You Know. The People You Trust." *********************************************************