Agents / Skills

On-call Handover

Skill

Structures the on-call shift change so nothing falls through the gap: active situations with their state and next steps, the week's pattern, landmines ahead — written, consistent, five minutes to read.

Best for

  • Rotations where the new shift learns by surprise
  • The Friday handover that currently says 'all quiet, probably'
  • Keeping situational awareness through vacations and weekends

What you give it

  • The shift's events: alerts, actions taken, ongoing items — from your tools or your notes

What you get back

  • The handover document: active items with exact state and next action, resolved-but-watch items, the pattern summary
  • The landmines section: deploys scheduled, certs expiring, the campaign that doubles traffic Saturday
  • A consistent shape shift over shift, so reading one takes five minutes and missing one is visible

How it works

  1. Separates by required attention: active (needs action or watching), watch (recovered but suspicious), closed (noise, summarised in one line).
  2. Captures state precisely for active items: what happened, what was done, current readings, the NEXT action and its threshold.
  3. Scans forward for landmines: scheduled changes, expiries, known traffic events in the incoming shift's window.
  4. Keeps one consistent shape so handovers are skimmable and their absence is noticeable.

Example

You: Build our handover format and write today's from this alert log and my notes.

Result: Today's handover: one ACTIVE item (the storage alert at 78% — growth rate attached, action threshold 85%, the cleanup command verified and linked), two WATCH items (the flaky sync recovered twice unexplained — pattern noted with timestamps), the pattern line (noisy Tuesday, quiet since), and three LANDMINES (Thursday's migration window, the TLS cert expiring Sunday — renewal owner tagged, and the marketing send at 9am that doubled traffic last time). Read time: four minutes; the Thursday migration did not surprise anyone.

Limits — please read

  • The handover reflects what the outgoing shift knew; it structures knowledge, it cannot create it.
  • Tool integration (pulling alerts automatically) depends on your stack; the format works either way.
  • Five minutes to read means discipline about the closed-noise section — it compresses ruthlessly.