Supporting customers in Odd hours

Giving a title to this subject was indeed a tough job because I was doing more of a reflective thinking. One of my colleague told me that, customer wake him up every day for one pre-text or other every alternative day. I told him that, i keep my phone either in silent mode or downstairs while I am sleeping. All of them were shocked. Initially they thought i do it because i do not have US customers to support. I told them, this is the fundamental principle I operate upon.

The guidelines are simple.

1. If your team is working while you are sleeping, they are expected to manage the situation. This is typically a communication we give to the team and typically we ensure that we use follow the sun model to handle all high severity issues.
   
2. If we are doing a grave yard shift, still the team is expected to handle along with shift in charge. Do not expect complete collapse everyday.
3. Anything other than above two dimensions, can wait till I wake up. The reason is that, to bring in experts and key people to have a look at the issue, would require my day time and i can do very little during my night time.

These guidelines are not applicable if we are doing a major go live and we are on hyper care support because the project is not in steady state both in terms of resource tuning and support process streamlining. Other than this, I strictly believe in the above approach.

There was a time i used to be awake by 4 AM in the morning and go through all the emails and analyze the critical issues. But still i had to wait till team is available (India business hours) to make the next steps. I could have done the same thing starting 8 AM in the morning. This is the retrospective thought.

We think that, we are the key to the success of operations, my suggestion is just change the way we and set appropriate expectations. With every change, there will be a transition period, but at the end of it, we get our life back...