Scrum Team Hours of Work / On-Call
Hi all,
I'm currently working with an organisation who are in a key growth period of their journey, having begun as a start up they are now transitioning into a more mature team. One of the elements we are discussing in on-call and I'm keen to get feedback from other's experience of working with Agile Teams / Dev Op's teams when on-call being a discussion point.
Ideally I would like to avoid having to implement full time (or at all) on-call - we already have monitors in place which are tracked 24/7. The discussion has come about again due to a number of larger changes (system migrations etc) coming in the next few weeks, on-call over the weekend following the deployment is up for debate. As we deliver more and more this topic may become a more frequent one.
I'm looking at only requesting this when we do specific changes or over specific periods (i.e Christmas on-call was in place) but I'm really open to suggestions, ideas and any experience you can share as to how this has been addressed in other times.
The second part to this is incentives when on all - finical was used over Christmas but again I don't want it to just be about this. I'm looking at holiday allowance in return but this has a knock on impact to current sprints in terms of people being OOO, I'm keen to know if anyone has tried any other ideas
Look forward to hearing your experience
Thanks
Does the expectation for handling on-call work originate from within your organization, or is it something that is being stipulated by an external client?
Also, how are you currently planning on-call work into a Sprint Backlog? How does it relate to each Sprint Goal? Or does it pre-empt your team's Sprint development work and is fast-tracked instead?
The initial request over Christmas period was one from the CTO as it's a period of lots of people out of office it was a way of ensuring someone was available if any issues arose
There isn't a specific request at the moment it's more of a reoccurring topic, the Scrum Team themselves are raising it as a consideration & actually CEO wants to avoid having to do it if possible.
We aren't currently planning it as we aren't currently doing on call other than the Christmas Period
How does this unplanned, on-call work impact the work that *has* been planned for the Sprint? Can the team still meet their Sprint Goal when this unplanned work arises?
Ideally you would want the team to be physically available f2f for scrum to be successful, but not always possible due to geographical locations and situations like on-call. By allowing on-call, you might solve part of the issue wherein the team is able to deliver unplanned on-call work which I assumed is outside the sprint work, but you are always risking the Sprint goal and you will continue to do so until you allow on-call, no matter how many sprints you complete and how many retrospective meetings you discussed the topin in.
If on-call work is part of your sprint, all you need is commitment from the dev team that the stories accepted by them will actually be delivered and sprint goal will be met. The Dev team , as supposed to be self organized, should then be able to work within themselves to meet the sprint goal. From my view, with technological advancement, you can use tools to display and track your scrum board and should be able to progress.
Regards
Pankaj