Let's start by saying that during an emergency is almost never the best time to be doing knowledge transfer. In an emergency the focus is necessarily on fixing the problem in the shortest possible time. Any kind of shadowing, mentoring or working together is going to slow this process down. Also people are under pressure, and are not likely to be at their best with their people skills.
Let me present some possible strategies:
- Have your less experienced teams do drills. Present the less experienced teams with real hot production issues, but after they are resolved. Don't let them see the actual fix, but let them investigate the issue themselves as if it were an emergency. Make the experienced team available for help but not to give them the fix.
- There is no substitute for face to face. Have the remote teams (or some members of them) visit the experienced team for a while so they can see everything that is done. Once you have a few people at the other sites who can do this, they can teach the other members of the teams.
- Have the experienced teams talk through the process with the inexperienced teams, again not during a real emergency, using voice links and shared screens.
- If you really want to do this during the emergency, voice links, web cams, and screen sharing would be my tools of choice.
