Follow The Sun Model Will Save Your Project and Relationship
The implementation or change to an infrastructure component requires a team of people. Due to the fact that most of your implementations occur in your technology maintenance window, which is likely in an overnight time slot, this can cause a time management issue on your personal schedule. In order to balance the implementation and your personal life, you need to approach implementations that occur for a single evening or over a weekend with a follow the sun approach.
The major technology companies have support centers in the US, Asia Pacific and Europe. This allows them to provide support to the customers all night long and reduces the dependency on working the implementation team for 24 hours straight. For your internal IT projects, you need to plan to have a team of people that has adjusted their schedule or perhaps geography to support the implementation all night long.
The team that will be scheduled should include technical team members along with resources that can report on the status of the implementation. The names of the resources should be published to the executives that may create status reports during the exercise.
Here is an example project and the benefit of implementing the follow the sun approach. If your legacy data center needs to be powered down and brought back online, this will be a weekend event that will run continuously from the start to the end. Due to this schedule, you may have a team that is responsible for failing over applications. This application team will be asked questions throughout the event on the status of the applications. These requests could come at all hours of the day and night as executives may also get calls at random hours for status. The application team needs to implement the follow the sun approach where resources can help the application's failover and failback along with creating the reports. This will eliminate the need for the same set of resources to work all night long on the failover and then come back the next day to work on the failback. Using resources in another time zone, you can offload the work and updates to another team that is fresh and works during a regular time period. Utilizing this method allows each team to turn off their phone and focus on their personal lives. Therefore when an executive calls for an update he will go to the time zone resource that is on call.
Your project and follow the sun approach should also employ an automated call distributor queue (ACD). Install a temporary ACD queue where all members providing support are scheduled to receive calls. Provide this single number to the executives for their updates. When they call that number, the person on call and in the queue will get the call. This eliminates the executive dialing any number they choose for an update.
For companies that demand US based domestic support, consider relocating some of your technical staff to Hawaii. The six-hour time difference will create a staggered schedule and avoids finding people with a body clock that works in the 1A-6A circadian rhythm model.
If you fail to implement a follow the sun model for your implementations, then you will be responsible for constant on-call coverage throughout the deployment time. This could interrupt important events and cause your mind to be present in another environment, even though you are physically at the event. Take the time to implement a follow the sun model for your projects. This will allow you the opportunity to balance your career in technology with the people that you care the most about. Don’t let updates on your project overcome the time with the people you love.