On-Call Schedule is released!

What is On-Call Schedule?

On-Call Schedule is an add-on to Google Sheet to help you quickly create/modify your on-call schedule on Google Calendar via Google Sheet.

Why need it?

On-Call Schedule helps save time by simplifying the process of creating/modifying on-call calendars when teams changed.

Why make it?

I lead a technical team in a SaaS company. In order to better serve our customers, the team needs to perform technical support and handle online troubleshooting when necessary. We created an on-call schedule using Google Calendar, and each person on the team was added to the on-call schedule for a fixed period of time to provide technical support and troubleshoot online issues for customers on the day of the on-call.

Initially, the team was small enough to update the duty roster by modifying the schedule on Google Calendar. Now that the team is a few dozen people, it's becoming more difficult to update the roster by editing Google Calendar when team members change. I have to spend more time to add or adjust the schedule execution cycle one by one.

So I was looking for an easy way to deal with this problem. Until one day, I found that Google Sheet might be a good solution. Enter team members into a Google Sheet as a list, and then automatically add or adjust Google Calendar schedules based on that list. Editing a Google Sheet is a lot less work than editing Google Calendar calendars one by one.

So, I created a Google Sheet plugin using Google App Script to solve the above problem. It's called On-Call Schedule and you can search for it in Google Workspace Marketplace and install it.

How does it work?

• First, we need to enter the team members into a Google Sheet, which should contain two columns: E-Mail, Name, which is used to help send the schedule invitations, and Name, which identifies the name of the schedule.
• The On-Call Schedule script will then read the contents of this Google Sheet and call the Google Calendar interface to create or modify the schedule. Add team members to the on-call schedule.
• When the Google Sheet changes, we run this again to modify the contents of the duty sheet and you don't have to worry about them being duplicated.

Q & A

On-Call Schedule makes it relatively easy to manage duty rosters based on team members, but I believe you may have the following questions.

Why does On-Call Schedule create a Daily when there are usually Daily and Weekly calendars?

Yes, Daily is the default method for On-Call Schedule, because at the time of creating this plugin I wasn't sure if the Weekly method was what most people wanted, and I would be happy to develop this feature if it was common.

Is it fair to others that the On-Call Schedule is created in a Daily format and some members will be scheduled for the weekend?

I'm glad you thought of such a detailed question. We know from probability that when the schedule is created with enough schedules and covers a long enough period of time, the number of shifts for each person is almost equal, which is not absolutely fair, but relatively fair. (The default length of On-Call Schedule is 90 days).

Is on-call a good team culture?

On-call is just a means to improve user experience and respond to emergencies. If you care about user experience or need to respond to some emergencies, on-call may be a good way to go. Large tech companies like Qunar, where I used to work, and Amazon, which you know well, use on-call to improve the user experience and respond to online emergencies.

It works for me?

If you are a manager and have a need for on-call scheduling. Then I think it's perfect for you, no matter what industry you are in. For example, companies, hospitals, schools, government departments, etc.