Coverage Gap Policy

What to do when no one's available.

Overview

Coverage gap policy defines what happens when no on-caller is available. Without a written policy, gaps produce silent escalation paths and slower MTTR. With one, gaps become a known mode the team has rehearsed.

• No-one-available scenarios. Vacation, sickness, scheduling errors, gap during handoff. Each shape needs a written response.
• Cross-team escalation. Adjacent team takes the page when the primary team has no on-call. Pre-arranged, not negotiated mid-incident.
• Manager engagement. Manager takes the page when both primary and secondary cannot respond. Final fallback before silent failure.
• Per-region backup plus quarterly review. Time-zone backup for global teams; quarterly gap review catches calendar drift before it becomes an outage.

The approach

Three habits keep coverage gap policy real instead of hypothetical: pre-arranged cross-team escalation, manager engagement as the documented final fallback, and quarterly gap reviews that catch calendar holes.

• Cross-team escalation. Pre-arranged with the adjacent team. The escalation flow exists in PagerDuty before the gap appears.
• Manager engagement. Manager is the documented final fallback. Acks are the manager’s responsibility when both responders fail.
• Per-region time-zone backup. Global teams cover each other’s gaps across time zones. The follow-the-sun pattern formalised.
• Quarterly gap review plus documented policy. Walk the rotation calendar each quarter for unfilled slots; per-team gap policy lives in the wiki.

Why this compounds

Each pre-arranged gap-coverage path preserves response capability when the rotation breaks. Compounded across the year, the team avoids the slow-failure pattern where gaps go unnoticed.

• Better incident response. Pre-arranged escalation produces fast response even during gaps. MTTR stays predictable.
• Team trust. Engineers know the rotation has a real safety net. On-call sustainability improves.
• Operational fit. Right policy matches the team’s actual rotation shape. Global teams need different policies than single-region ones.
• Year-one investment, year-two habit. The first policy is heavy lift. By year two, the gap-coverage flow runs automatically.