Glossary
On-Call Elevation
On-call elevation grants temporary, broader access to whoever currently holds an on-call rotation, so they can respond to an incident in a service they don't normally own or operate day to day. The access is tied to the rotation itself rather than to any individual permanently — when the rotation changes hands, the elevated access should move with it, granted to the new on-call engineer and withdrawn from whoever held it before, rather than accumulating with each person who's ever taken a turn.
The common failure here is treating on-call elevation as a one-time setup rather than a continuously rotating grant: an engineer who was on call once, six months ago, and never had that elevated access explicitly revoked afterward, quietly retains standing access to systems they no longer have any operational reason to touch — exactly the kind of forgotten grant that time-bound access is meant to prevent, reintroduced through a rotation that wasn't kept properly in sync.