I am writing performance expectations and work in the IT field. We have a few major systems that cannot have any downtime. So, I need multiple people to be responsible for it. If there is an outage, I need either person to be able to handle the situation. One problem, I have seen in the past that if you have a Primary and Secondary, then the Primary knows the system well, but the Secondary becomes stale. So, I wanted to put these systems as both employees’ responsibilities, so both of them have the right to make changes as long as they go through the Change Control and agreed upon. The only thing is some employee’s rather full ownership instead of shared. So, they don’t want anyone else making changes. Has anyone had this problem? Or, how have you handled it where you have two people that need to make sure they can support a specific system?
No easy answers in my experience
Hello
I work in a similar IT environment. I am on call for some systems I used to work full-time on, but I now have another assignment. My experience is that there is no easy answer here. The secondary person needs to be doing regular work on the system being supported. It doesn't have to be hugely frequent, but the alternative is that the skills become stale as you say.
If you are currently writing the expectations, perhaps you could set a target for the secondary person to work on X tickets per quarter to keep their knowledge fresh?
Hope that helps.
Rob
Rotate
To keep everyone fresh, rotate through the roles. We've got our entire support department on a rota system, where you deal with one type of work for a period, and then move onto the next. It increases the training required a little, but it means we've got a solid team of all-rounders who can deal with anything should the worst happen. You may not be able to rotate (say) 20 people through all of your systems, but even if you created mini-rotas of four people each, you'd have much better coverage of key systems. At the *very* least, swap people between primary/secondary periodically. If nothing else, it limits the amount of stress that any one person has to bear as being "the person" for a particularly cranky system.
Thanks
Thanks for the advice.