Write down who gets called for each kind of failure, and the calls stop coming to you by default.
Why does one person end up taking every call?
Because deciding who to wake up is a judgment, and the judgment exists in exactly one place.
Somebody calls at two in the morning. A system is down. Which system, how bad is it, who owns that area, is this the kind of thing that waits until morning, who is on vacation this week.
Those questions get answered by whoever holds the whole picture. In most small companies that is one person, and every call routes to them because no alternative path exists.
The person on the receiving end usually reads this as a workload problem and tries to solve it by being more available. Availability is not the constraint. The absence of a written rule is.
What does a 24-hour operation require overnight?
The warehouses ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year, excluding Christmas and a couple of other holidays.
An operation like that needs somebody to call at three in the morning. Not somebody who might answer. Somebody whose job at that moment is to answer.
For a long stretch, that was me. Every call came to me, and I decided who got contacted, who got woken up, and what could wait. Every time, for anything.
I was not doing anyone a favor by absorbing it. I was the single point through which every night-time decision had to pass, and a single point that needs sleep is a design flaw rather than a virtue.
How do you build an escalation process without a platform?
A form and somebody paid to follow it.
We set up a help desk, run by US Technical Services. Somebody there answered the call, worked through a routing form, and contacted the right person directly.
This system failed, that system failed, here is who gets called. Not a platform, not an on-call product, and certainly not anything with intelligence in it. A form, and a person following it at three in the morning.
I stopped being woken for every small error, and the person who could fix the problem got contacted first rather than second.
What goes in an escalation form?
Less than people expect.
The failure types you see in practice, which is a shorter list than anyone believes before they write it down. Who owns each one. Who gets called if that person does not answer. What can wait until morning and what cannot.
Nothing else goes in, and it fits on a page. The hard part is admitting how few distinct situations there really are, because the person holding the judgment experiences each night as unique.
They are not unique. Most on-call decisions repeat, and the exceptions are rare enough that a form can say escalate to the manager for anything not listed.
Who should answer the phone at three in the morning?
Somebody whose job it is, rather than somebody who happens to be reachable.
Those are different arrangements. A person who is paid to answer, has the routing form in front of them, and does this every night will handle a call better than a senior engineer who was asleep and is now trying to remember who covers what.
For a company that cannot staff an overnight desk, the same principle applies to whoever is on duty. Give them the form. The value is in the routing being decided in advance, not in who reads it.
What this changes is subtle. The technical people stop being the first line and become the second, and they get called only when the call is theirs. That single change is most of what makes on-call survivable.
What does being the bottleneck cost a company?
More than the sleep, and the other costs are the ones nobody counts.
Every call routed through one person adds delay, because the call reaches a hop before it reaches a fixer. At two in the morning that delay is the difference between an incident and an outage.
It also means nobody else learns to make the decision. The judgment stays in one head, and the longer it stays there the harder it becomes to write down, because the person holding it stops noticing they are applying rules at all.
And it hides the pattern. When one person absorbs everything, nobody sees that the same three systems generate most of the calls, because there is no record. A routing form creates one as a byproduct.
What should you write down first?
The last ten calls you took, and who should have taken each one.
That exercise takes an hour and produces the first draft of the form. Most people are surprised by how much repetition appears, and by how many of those calls had an obvious owner who was not contacted.
Then add the two or three cases that really are yours. Those exist and they should be named, because a form that pretends the manager is never needed will be ignored the first time it is wrong.
The goal is not to remove yourself from every call. It is to be called for the ones that need you, which turns out to be a small fraction of what currently arrives.
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