How to Rotate Between Entire User Groups

When to Rotate Between Groups

Instead of rotating individual people, you might want to rotate on-call responsibility between entire teams. For example:

• Week 1: The @dev-team-a user group is on-call.
• Week 2: The @dev-team-b user group is on-call.

Tellspin supports this by allowing you to add Slack user groups as participants in a rotation schedule.

Prerequisites: Create Your Slack User Groups

Before you create the Tellspin schedule, make sure the Slack user groups you want to rotate between already exist. For example, you should have @dev-team-a and @dev-team-b created and populated with the correct members in Slack.

Creating the Tellspin Schedule

1. From the Tellspin App Home, click Create Schedule.
2. Give your schedule a name (e.g., "Tier 2 Support Rotation") and choose a contact method. Using a User Group contact method is common here, which will create a new user group (e.g., @tier-2-oncall) that Tellspin will manage.
3. Set your desired rotation frequency, such as Weekly.

Adding User Groups to the Rotation

This is the key step. In the Participants section, you will add the user groups themselves, not the individual members.

1. Click into the Add participants search box.

2. Type the name of your first user group (e.g., dev-team-a).

3. Select the user group from the list. It will appear with an @ prefix.

4. Repeat the process to add your other user groups to the rotation list.

   

How Handoffs Work

When a handoff occurs, Tellspin will update the members of the managed user group (@tier-2-oncall in our example) to match the members of the next user group in the rotation.

For a weekly rotation:

• Week 1: @tier-2-oncall will contain all members of @dev-team-a.
• Week 2: At the handoff time, Tellspin will remove the members of @dev-team-a and add all members of @dev-team-b.

The schedule preview will show the user groups in the rotation order.

Limitations and Considerations

• Nested Rotations: This method does not create a "rotation within a rotation." For example, if @dev-team-a is on-call for the week, all members of that group are considered on-call by Tellspin. It does not rotate through the individuals within that group on a daily basis.
• User Group Source: This feature is different from using a single user group as the source of participants for a rotation of individuals. This guide is specifically about rotating between multiple, distinct user groups.