on-call-handoff-patterns

# On-Call Handoff Patterns

Effective patterns for on-call shift transitions, ensuring continuity, context transfer, and reliable incident response across shifts.

## When to Use This Skill

- Transitioning on-call responsibilities
- Writing shift handoff summaries
- Documenting ongoing investigations
- Establishing on-call rotation procedures
- Improving handoff quality
- Onboarding new on-call engineers

## Core Concepts

### 1. Handoff Components

| Component                  | Purpose                 |
| -------------------------- | ----------------------- |
| **Active Incidents**       | What's currently broken |
| **Ongoing Investigations** | Issues being debugged   |
| **Recent Changes**         | Deployments, configs    |
| **Known Issues**           | Workarounds in place    |
| **Upcoming Events**        | Maintenance, releases   |

### 2. Handoff Timing

```
Recommended: 30 min overlap between shifts

Outgoing:
├── 15 min: Write handoff document
└── 15 min: Sync call with incoming

Incoming:
├── 15 min: Review handoff document
├── 15 min: Sync call with outgoing
└── 5 min: Verify alerting setup
```

## Templates

### Template 1: Shift Handoff Document

````markdown
# On-Call Handoff: Platform Team

**Outgoing**: @alice (2024-01-15 to 2024-01-22)
**Incoming**: @bob (2024-01-22 to 2024-01-29)
**Handoff Time**: 2024-01-22 09:00 UTC

---

## 🔴 Active Incidents

### None currently active

No active incidents at handoff time.

---

## 🟡 Ongoing Investigations

### 1. Intermittent API Timeouts (ENG-1234)

**Status**: Investigating
**Started**: 2024-01-20
**Impact**: ~0.1% of requests timing out

**Context**:

- Timeouts correlate with database backup window (02:00-03:00 UTC)
- Suspect backup process causing lock contention
- Added extra logging in PR #567 (deployed 01/21)

**Next Steps**:

- [ ] Review new logs after tonight's backup
- [ ] Consider moving backup window if confirmed

**Resources**:

- Dashboard: [API Latency](https://grafana/d/api-latency)
- Th