Stand By Duty

Contents

Being On Duty

When you are on duty, you become the SPOC (single point of contact) for a production environment, your primary tasks are to:

  1. Make sure the production environment continues to operate as expected
  2. Process any incoming requests and implement any requested changes

To achieve this, you need to ensure you are able to keep close tabs on your environment at all times. You should configure it to notify you via email or some other way when things are not as they should be, giving you the opportunity to resolve them before your manager asks you to.

Handing Over

  • At the end of your duty period, you need to hand over duty to the next person
  • This needs to be done in a chat with at least one witness
    • Person currently on duty needs to:
      • Signal that they are ready for hand over
      • Share any outstanding tasks or pertinent info
    • Person coming onto duty:
      • Acknowledges the request to come on duty
      • Confirms ability deal with outstanding tasks
      • Is required to double check current status
    • Once the person coming onto duty is happy with the state of the environment, they confirm in the same chat, that they have taken ownership of the environment
  • If there is a bit more to discuss than usual, a meeting can be held with just the 2 of you, as long as it is recorded

Trading

  • You may trade or swap duty days and times
  • This will change the schedule and will not count as a stand in
  • Trades cannot be made once the period to be traded has started
  • All trades need to be reported to your manager within a reasonable time of the trade being made

Stand In

  • If you are for some reason not able to be on duty, and you have not traded your days, you need someone to stand in for you
  • Stand in's should only be used during emergencies
  • When someone stand's in for you, you owe them that time back
    • The person who stood in can force you to take their duty in the future
    • If you are unable to come to an agreement, consult your manager to resolve, their decision will be final
  • All stand ins need to be reported to your manager immediately

SLA

In order to maintain a high standard, we should aim to:

  • Respond to all requests within three hours, provided the request was made within "working hours" (defined as 08:00 to 17:00 every day)
  • Attend to requests made outside of working hours by 10:00 the next day
  • Notify the relevant person/s of any issues or delays in completion within 1 day of discovering the issue or delay

Time Keeping

  • You are required to keep track of the hours worked as part of your duty
  • You must record the number of hours per day with a short description of work for each hour
  • Please submit this to your manager at the end of your duty as part of your hand over

Compensation

Looking after a production environment is a lot of responsibility and goes beyond the normal call of duty (and our existing contracts). It's common practice within the industry to compensate your employees for going the extra mile in making themselves available to babysit systems 24/7, however in TSI we are still trying to figure out how to handle this. We are engaging with HR to help them understand the type of work we do when on duty so that an appropriate framework can be setup, but in the meantime, the following applies:

  • Public Holidays: Public holidays do not affect your duty and there is no special compensation
  • Leave: If you have taken leave for the days you are on duty and have logged more than 1 hours work, you may cancel that day's leave
  • Monetary: None

Current Duties

Artificial Intelligence

  • Inactive
    • Roxi

Data Management

Data Science

Engineering

  • Active
    • CovidConnect
    • TSI Pipelines
  • Inactive
    • Tableau Server
    • Moodle / LMS
    • Git & GitLab
    • Echo
    • GCP