Forest is a sort of "meta" Support Global Group, where managers and team members collaborate to grow new ideas and solve problems within individual SGGs. While Forest isn't an actual SGG, the Forest Slack channel gives managers an opportunity to work more closely together as a "global group" in support of SGG. Forest provides increased visibility on SGG and manager capacity, and serves as a place to strategize on global and regional SGG initiatives.
We encourage all SGG team members to collaborate with managers in Forest to discuss ideas, challenges, and successes, and to seek help when needed.
Each day, much like for each Support Global Group, a bot notifies the channel of regional manager availability, SGG load, and on-call details (including US Fed for the AMER region). This starts the daily thread where managers can highlight:
Additionally, managers are encouraged to use the information from the bot to make decisions when finding assignees for escalated tickets, managing simultaneous emergencies, or strategizing on capacity-related concerns for a given SGG and the impact that may have on FRT/NRT focuses.
While each SGG is encouraged to work together and develop a plan for upcoming time off, escalations, on-call, or other focuses that may reduce the number of engineers available to help work tickets in a group, managers can also support SGGs and their team members in a variety of ways.
The following are suggestions only. There is no particular order or requirement to go through each, nor is there a limit to stick with just one approach:
at risk+
(high OOOs) and which groups may have capacity to helpat risk+
(see table below), and asking them to try to help with FRT and possibly with assignment, tooWhat is a Tanuki? A Tanuki is a Support Engineer who will divide their time (i.e. "float") between their SGG and another SGG that is low on staff to help with tickets (FRTs and/or NRTs, depending on where the help will be most effective).
Future ideas and iterations to increase both manager and SGG team member collaboration in this group are welcome.
On-call managers can summarize any escalations that require next region attention. This is a good area where we can iterate/evolve further.