Override schedule involved lot of manual work

#1

Hi,

Currently, when we need to override for an on-call person for a week and who is on-call for only a specific time every day, we need to select each day schedule and create an override.

When we select start and end date then the entire layer is override rather than only the time for which he is on-call.

Is there any plan to improve the override portion to specify the start and end dates with a time range, so that on a single click override happens for all selected dates for that time range only.

I see similar /forum/t/better-schedule-overriding/987 Do we have any updates on this.

Thanks,
Ashwin

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#2

We have a feature request with PagerDuty for this exact issue but no updates as yet. Sorry.

#3

Thanks for letting me know.

#4

Hi @ashwin46,

I’m on the Product team at PagerDuty. We’re currently working ways to improve this workflow that we hope to release within the next several months! I’ll reach out on this thread if there are any early access opportunities.

Thanks for your feedback!
Katie

3 Likes
#5

Hi, we have a similar situation to this:
Scenario
We have 6 rotas and 8 on-call staff covering different rotas.
Our schedules have been set up with 2 layers: 1st for daytime shifts and 2nd for out-of-hours on-call.

Challenge
If someone is off sick for 3 days and I want to cover their daytime shifts I have to go to each schedule that they are scheduled for and enter an override for each day and the hours that I’m covering.

Feature request

  1. From People -> On-call Schedules select on My Teams. I would like a checkbox on each schedule to select multiple schedules and then ‘schedule an override’.
  2. On the ‘Schedule an override’ pop-up I would like to be able to select ‘Layer1’ or ‘Layer2’ so that I can override all the daytime shifts for the 3 days I’m covering.

FR_Selecting_Layer_Override
FR_Selecting_Layer_Override.jpg1457×552 142 KB
FR_Selecting_Schedules
FR_Selecting_Schedules.jpg1457×961 191 KB

2 Likes
#6

Hello Neil,

Thanks for reaching out on community and sharing your feedback. While its not something we can support at this time we are happy to pass along these details as a feature request to our schedules team.

Sorry we cannot help you out with this right now, but do let me know if you have any more questions.

John

#7

Can PagerDuty please post an update on this request? There are at least two other closely related request.

All three of these requests are years old. The PT Product team promised some improvements in March of 21. The promise was too vague to know if they ever came out but the fact remains that the current worflow is schedule-centric, vs. user-centric. This is a significant failure to understand how your users use the system.

I have my second senior SRE going on month-long paternity leave this year. Each of these people are on multiple on-call schedules. As with most of the schedules that people have describe around this problem, they are only on call for a period day each day. This leaves me, or them, with literally hundreds of overrides to make. Each requires three clicks, typing in at least part of the name of the person taking the shift, and two waiting periods, one for a dropdown of users to populate, and a second for the override to save. I work for a SaaS company. This kind of workflow in a key use case, simply isn’t acceptable.

For my use case (and I think most of the ones described) the solution would entail starting with the user going on leave, and the period of time for which they will be on leave and show all rotations they will be on duty for in that timeframe. Then for each rotation, select start and end date (default to the original timeframe selected), and an alternative staff member, and assign them as overrides to all in-scope shifts. Rinse and repeat until all shifts on all rotations are covered.

I would be happy to discuss this further if PD should have questions. In the mean time though, please excuse, as I have a lot of clicking to do…

1 Like