It's beginning to look a lot like

It’s slightly odd that there is not more talk about Christmas on that LinkedIn. It’s almost as if we are in denial about it happening, even though it’s less than two weeks away. I thought I’d briefly cover a few points to bear in mind.

Sort your on-call out in August

Q4 ends with a big old holiday. You must be ready for it. Do not try to sort it out in December. This is dumb. Could you sort it out in August? This gives you time to iterate and for much back and forth with people’s families.

Do not introduce a special on-call system over Christmas

You may end up with a slightly different rota because some people don’t mind working over the holidays. That’s nice of them. Don’t let someone join the on-call team just before Christmas because they won’t have time to get up to speed on processes. Oh and that’s another thing - make sure everyone knows what the escalation path is and that there is a senior sympathetic ear on it before it gets to the CEO. In fact, don’t have your CEO on the escalation path. They do nothing but add HIPPO issues to an already complex situation.

Figure out if your service’s traffic will be different

It will.

Who knew there were very few flights out of the UK on Christmas Day? Not me until I got called out because the monitoring thought there was something up with the queue sizes. The only plane had one of the royals on it. Wonder which…This is overall another point - if you already have your ducks in a row, then Christmas should have little effect on your on-call processes. Chaos testing, in particular, is fantastic for making sure you know what will happen if you suddenly start seeing odd traffic flows.So enjoy it, and I’ll return to say Happy New Year as soon as I slim down enough to get near my desk.