On-Call Handover Checklist: What to Pass On at Shift Change
Most on-call surprises are handover failures: something the last person knew and the next person did not. A short written handover removes most of them.
A handover is the transfer of responsibility from the outgoing on-call person to the incoming one. Its purpose is to move context, not only the pager. The incoming person should leave the handover knowing what is currently wrong, what might go wrong and what to do about each.
Hold it at a sensible time
Schedule the handover in working hours for both people, in the time zone of the schedule. A handover at midnight is rushed, and one that depends on an overlap in the middle of someone's night is rarely done. Keep it short, ten to fifteen minutes, and keep a written record that does not depend on memory.
The checklist
- Open incidents: each with its status, severity, who leads and the next scheduled update.
- Resolved incidents from the past shift that may recur, and the workaround used.
- Known fragile areas: systems that are degraded, being watched or operating on a temporary fix.
- Recent and upcoming changes: releases, migrations, configuration changes, certificate expiries and freezes in the next week.
- Noisy or misleading alerts: those that fired repeatedly and what they usually mean.
- Pending actions: promised customer updates, follow-ups waiting on a vendor, tasks to finish.
- Planned absences: who is away, and who covers them.
- Contacts and access: confirm the incoming person can reach the systems and the escalation contacts, and has the credentials the role needs.
- Schedule confirmation: the incoming person confirms the period they are covering and any overrides.
A written template
Keep the written note to a single page: date and time; outgoing and incoming names; open incidents with links; things to watch; changes coming up; anything promised to customers; and anything the outgoing person wishes they had known at the start of their shift. The last line is the most valuable and the one most often skipped.
Use the system of record
Link to the incident records rather than retelling them. In Atlas, each incident has a timeline of updates, so the incoming person can read the actual sequence of events, and the On call page shows who is covering now and the handovers ahead. Before ending the handover, the incoming person should open On call and confirm that their name is the one at the top.
Improve it over time
- Ask the incoming person, at the end of their shift, what was missing from the handover.
- Add the answer to the checklist.
- Retire items that never matter.