Standardize On-Call Handoffs

Provides effective patterns for on-call shift transitions, covering context transfer, handoff documentation templates, sync meeting structure, and reliable incident response continuity across shifts.

Use this skill when transitioning on-call responsibilities, writing shift handoff summaries, documenting ongoing investigations, establishing on-call rotation procedures, improving handoff quality, or onboarding new on-call engineers. Not a fit for incident response procedures themselves once mid-incident work is already underway with no handoff pending, or for topics unrelated to on-call transitions.

Defines five core handoff components (active incidents, ongoing investigations, recent changes, known issues, upcoming events) and a recommended 30-minute shift-overlap timing split into outgoing document-writing and sync-call phases, then incoming document-review, sync-call, and alerting-verification phases.

Provides three full handoff templates: a comprehensive Shift Handoff Document covering active incidents, ongoing investigations with status/context/next-steps/resources, resolved-this-shift summaries with postmortem links, recent deployments and config/infrastructure changes, known issues with workarounds, upcoming events, an escalation contact table, quick-reference commands, and separate outgoing/incoming checklists; a Quick Handoff (Async) template with a TL;DR, watch list, recent changes, and upcoming events for lower-stakes transitions; and a mid-incident Incident Handoff template capturing current state, root cause understanding, actions taken, next steps, key people (incident commander, comms lead, technical lead), and communication status.

Defines a 15-minute handoff sync meeting agenda (active issues, recent changes, upcoming events, questions) and pre-shift, during-shift, and post-shift checklists covering access verification, alerting setup, knowledge refresh, daily routine, and shift closeout. Escalation guidance defines immediate-escalation triggers (SEV1 declared, suspected data breach, unable to diagnose within 30 minutes, customer/legal escalation) versus consider-escalation triggers (multi-team issues, missing expertise, uncertain next steps), plus a four-step escalation procedure. Best practices recommend documenting everything, escalating early, taking breaks against alert fatigue, keeping handoffs synchronous rather than async-only, and testing setup before incidents; anti-patterns include skipping handoffs, "heroing" instead of escalating, ignoring alerts, working while sick, and going unreachable during a shift.

References PagerDuty for on-call scheduling and alert routing, Grafana for dashboards, Slack for incident channels, and Kubernetes/PostgreSQL/Redis commands as example quick-reference diagnostics within the handoff document template.

On-call engineers and SRE teams standardizing shift transitions who need concrete handoff document templates, sync meeting structure, and escalation triggers rather than an ad hoc verbal handoff with no documented context transfer.

### On-Call Handoff: Platform Team
**Outgoing**: @alice (2024-01-15 to 2024-01-22)
**Incoming**: @bob (2024-01-22 to 2024-01-29)