When it breaks
Who May Be Woken, and Who Decides That
Waking somebody is a decision about a person's sleep. It belongs to the people affected, made in daylight, not to whoever is alarmed at two in the morning.
three things · three nights · one that no number of nights settles
Four shapes, and the last is a decision about people rather than about systems.
Four nights on one team, and what happened at each
One person woken at 02:40 by agreement made in advance; resolved by 04:00
Nobody woken; the rule said alerts without customer impact wait
Nobody woken; the rollback was the designed behaviour
Nobody woken, and the client was told the next morning what had happened
four things · one night · three that no number of nights settles
Four nights, one night's work, and three occasions on which nobody was woken. The three were not judgement calls made at two in the morning; they followed a rule written down in daylight by the people it applies to. Nothing here says what any other team's rule should contain. One team's own month, recorded by whoever held the rota.
On a team with no shared hour, there is always somebody asleep. Which means the question of whether to wake them is not occasional. It is available every single night.
For the situation in Who May Be Woken, and Who Decides That, a good tool should reduce questions rather than create another reporting burden. this workplace tool records work as it happens and turns it into timesheets and summaries the team can review later.
For a second perspective on the surrounding workflow, consult Zendesk's service platform; it shows how a widely used platform structures the same coordination problem.
A team that has not decided this in advance decides it in the moment, by whoever is most alarmed, which is the worst available process.
Why this cannot be decided in the moment
The person deciding is under pressure, has incomplete information, and is weighing a concrete present problem against an abstract cost to somebody who is not there.
Those conditions produce a predictable bias. The problem in front of you feels urgent; a colleague's sleep does not feel like anything, because they are asleep. Decisions made this way trend in one direction over time, and the direction is towards more waking.
The accumulated effect is a team where people sleep badly because they might be called, which is a cost paid every night whether or not anybody is actually woken.
What a rule needs to contain
Four things, and it fits on a few lines.
What counts as bad enough. Stated in observable terms rather than in severity labels, which get argued about. "Customers cannot complete a purchase" is a criterion. "Severity one" is a label somebody has to map onto reality at two in the morning.
Who may be woken for it. Named roles or named people, not "whoever is needed".
Who may make the call. This is separate from who gets woken and is frequently left out. Without it, the decision falls to whoever is holding the problem, which is the person least able to weigh it.
What happens if nobody is woken. The explicit alternative: the thing waits, with a named consequence accepted in advance.
| Item | Why it is separate from the others |
|---|---|
| What counts as bad enough | Stated observably, not as a severity label somebody must interpret at 03:00 |
| Who may be woken | Named roles or people, not "whoever is needed" |
| Who may make the call | Usually not the person holding the problem |
| What happens if nobody is woken | The alternative, accepted in advance |
Writing it in daylight, with the people it affects
The rule should be written by the people whose sleep it governs, and agreed by them, not issued.
This is not only fairness. A rule somebody agreed to is a rule they will not resent being used, and the resentment is the thing that actually breaks these arrangements. People do not object to being woken for something that matters. They object to being woken under a rule they never saw.
It also produces a better rule, because the people on the rota know which alerts are real and which are not, and that knowledge does not exist anywhere else.
Nothing here is advice about what is permitted
What an employer may require of somebody outside their working hours, whether being available at night has to be paid for and at what rate, what rest a person is entitled to after being woken, and what has to be agreed before any of it is expected — all of that is set by law and by contract, differs by place, and changes.
This page does not address any of it, and a team writing a rule of the kind described here should find out what applies where each of its people actually works before relying on it. That is a question for somebody qualified there.
The acceptable-loss sentence
The most useful line in any such rule is the one that says what the team is willing to lose overnight.
"Reports may be wrong until morning. Customers being unable to pay is not acceptable overnight." Two clauses, and between them they resolve most of the three-in-the-morning judgement calls without anybody having to make one.
Teams avoid writing this because it means stating out loud that something will be allowed to stay broken. That statement is true whether or not it is written; the only question is whether it is decided deliberately or discovered.
Who gets woken repeatedly
Worth watching, because it is invisible.
Rotas distribute the possibility of being woken evenly. They do not distribute the actuality, which follows the failures, which follow the systems, which are usually owned by particular people.
A count — who was actually woken, how often, over a quarter — takes five minutes to compile and frequently shows one person absorbing most of it. That person is unlikely to mention it, because each individual night was justified.
The cost of the rule being absent
A team without one does not avoid the decision. It makes the decision nightly, inconsistently, under pressure, and then lives with the consequences for a long time, because being woken unnecessarily is remembered and resented in a way that the incident itself is not.
Writing it down costs an hour, once, in daylight, with the people concerned.