SLO Handoff Between Teams

Service ownership moves; SLOs that do not move with it become orphans. The handoff is mechanical but rarely done.

Why SLOs orphan

Team A owns service X with SLO. Team B inherits service X. SLO stays in A’s alerts; A’s on-call gets paged for B’s service.

The SLO must move; in practice it forgets to.

Four-step handoff

• 1. Document the SLO and its history.
• 2. Update alert routing to new team.
• 3. Update dashboard ownership.
• 4. Joint owners during transition.

Joint-ownership transition

Old team and new team jointly own for one quarter. Old team mentors; new team learns the SLO’s context.

Cleaner than instant handoff; preserves institutional memory.

Quarterly audit

Quarterly: catalog of services and their owning teams; SLO owners verified.

Anything mismatched gets re-handed off explicitly.

Antipatterns

• Silent handoff. Old team continues to own (or nobody does).
• Instant handoff with no joint period. New team flying blind.
• No catalog audit. Mismatches accumulate.

What to do this week

Three moves. (1) Apply the pattern to your most-impactful service. (2) Measure adherence for 30 days. (3) Rewrite the policy or the SLO if the gap is durable.