A lot of modern & self-organized teams face a common challenge: Who provides support to highly sophisticated services within complex domains? Who is "On-Call" after office hours being able to provide deep domain knowledge in case of an emergency?
Point Taken allows to cope with this challenge in a sustainable way: Members of the domain team (developers, Product Owners, etc.) can participate on a voluntary basis to provide this kind of support - during releases, hypercare or as a general service towards the stakeholders.
By supplying worklogs this kind of "extra time on the job" is made transparent and can be rewarded in a fair way by the use of a flexible point system. Merits coming from the earned points are routed to existing payout channels like HR for vacation or payroll for additional payments.
We believe that the accountability for the quality of service to a product has to be provided where it belongs: In the domain, that implements & maintains the service.
Point Taken helps to incentivise developers and product owners to provide their domain knowledge or provide On-Call duty outside the usual working hours.
The time to response is being shortened, extra work gets extra benefits - it is being noticed & rewarded. The observable effect is usually: Dev-Teams are self-motivated to increase the quality of their services, because being alarmed during leisure time is something most people want to avoid.
Most importantly for team leads or management: Once processes are clarified with HR merits can be channeled through the usual methods of compensation like additional payments via payroll or issuing extra vacation also obeying local laws and tax regulations.
Proteges use the Point Taken App to supply testiments of their work. Points are being calculated transparently and automatically based on a provided point schema per single log entry.
While it is the job of Proteges to provide after-hours work and track the invested times it is the responsibility of a Caretaker to evaluate, approve or decline the provided logs.
Caretakers can create reports that summarize the work of the proteges for a month. This report has to be forwarded to HR and payroll to issue compensations in time.
As a caretaker you can get a notifcation via Mail and on your device if there are pending logs or proteges. This allows you to react quicker and ask if there are any inconsistencies or need for clarification.
Along with an acknowledged report you will get the raw data in form of a CSV that was used to create the calculations in the report via Mail. Proteges get a user centric report on the earned points and merits upon an report, that was acknowledged by the caretaker.
Proteges use a caretaker specific invite code to view and accept a caretaker and the point schema. After the caretaker Opt-In to a new protege the submission of logs can start.
As a protege Point Taken offers you to easily keep track of your after hours work and easily inform about stuff you worked on - completely decoupled from On-Premise systems, etc..
As caretaker you have the oportunity to review the supplied logs at your own pace. Points are calculated automatically and you can trigger a report that you can sign and handover to HR.
As an agile, domain oriented company you can easily include the people who work on the code and the product everyday to the intense process of support - maybe even without having a dedicated 1st Level at all and living Site Reliability Engineering.
Point Taken focusses on people not primarily working in first level support but in various roles within development teams (developers, product owners, all sorts of engineers, etc.). It should easily bring merits to work that is done "on top" of the usual job, make this work transparent and decouple the process for rewards earned during this time.
First level support on the other hand is a totally different game with its own ecosystem of tools all around it. Also it usually has dedicated people to it that are professionals when it comes to alarming, incident management and uptime monitoring during business hours and after - which have a much more sophisticated set of tools running to ease their day to day work.
(Currently in closed Alpha - contact us if you are interested!)
