One of the big issues facing any IT organisation is that typically, while their business is IT, the business that they support is not. So, if we take an insurance company as an example, 95% of its employees are geared, in one way or another, to insurance. That may be in the call centre cold calling potential clients, in the claims department processing claims or an actuary figuring out a new algorithm that sets them apart from the rest. The other 5% are its IT management staff. They usually have limited knowledge about insurance and their colleagues in turn are weak in IT. Because of this, IT is very often seen as a separate organisation. A separate organisation who speaks a different language. And it is for this reason, that proper communication is key.

In any relationship, good communication is essential to ensuring that both parties are happy, their needs are met and expectations are clear. It's no different when it comes to IT and Business. And since IT are delivering a service to Business, they are required to speak in their language.

Being able to translate IT into business speak is an essential skill which is often lacking in the IT organisation. Probably the two most important times that this skill is required is when requesting budget and during a crisis. In this article, we're going to discuss the latter, in particular: who communicates, who they communicate to, how they communicate as well as what they should be communicating and when.

An IT crisis is known as a Major Incident which is a crisis involving IT that has severe negative business consequences, typically a service outage. The person most suitable for this role is the Major Incident Manager since they should be the one guiding the team and formulating the action plan to follow. The seniority of the role should also mean that the individual is taken seriously by Business. Getting communication from a senior individual puts the Business at ease, knowing that the right level of focus has been given to the issue.

‘The Man in the Middle'

During a crisis, the person communicating with business plays an important role for two reasons:

A) He/she keeps the business updated. Well let's be honest - they aren't happy when their systems are down. They're probably losing money by the second. But as long as they are informed that someone is doing something about it, they at least have a measure of comfort.

B) He/she lets IT people do what IT people do. IT engineers are distracted when asked for updates, or ‘how long before it's fixed'. He/she takes the pressure to communicate away from the IT staff and allows them to get on with dealing with the crisis.

To do this best, he/she needs to be able to communicate well with both IT staff and Business. This means not having to repeatedly ask IT staff to explain themselves, having a measure of technical understanding of the steps they are undertaking to restore the service and being able to explain this, without the technical jargon, to the Business.

It is essential that communication comes from one source. This is to ensure that all involved understand that there is one team looking after this issue and that they are working together with a single focus.

The Ones Most Relevant

At the outset of any Major Incident, the Key Stakeholders should be established. This is known as a ‘Tiger Team'. The Key Stakeholders will consist of both IT and Business staff and should be limited to those individuals who are either directly affected by the outage or those who are responsible for resolution of the service outage as well as their management staff.

During the classification of a Major Incident, those affected should have been established. Depending on the service and size of the organisation, this may span thousands of users. It is therefore impractical to communicate with individual users. An Interactive Voice Message (IVR) should be at the service desk, if possible or culturally acceptable, to inform users of the outage and that investigation is underway. Preferably, the call should still be responded to by an agent. All other communication with Business should be limited to the business owners or managers of the business units which are affected by the outage. Depending on what is agreed up front with business (communication is key!) these business owners / managers can user their own mechanisms to disseminate this message on to their users and even clients if necessary. It would also be wise to keep the executive team up to speed, as they will likely receive pressure from the business owners and possibly clients. Keeping them informed will mean that they have answers when the phone starts ringing.

What They Need to Know and by When

There are four distinct phases of communication during a Major incident and they each require a different message:

Activation

Once a Major Incident has occurred, it is necessary to inform the Key Stakeholders. A simple message stating that it has occurred, the service affected and that a team is investigating, will suffice. This should go out via an official channel. Again – this channel should be agreed upfront with business and documented in the Incident Management policy. Ideally this should be via email, but if email is the affected service, secondary and tertiary mechanisms should be in place. These may be SMS, voice conference call or even group IM (e.g. Whatsapp). As long as they are formally agreed to and expected by business.

Investigation

During investigation, it is not simply not good enough to tell Business that ‘we are investigating the issue'. To properly understand what a business owner wants to hear from IT, one needs to put oneself in the shoes of the business. A statement like that puts them completely in the dark and leaves them powerless when their employees and clients come looking for answers. They need to, at the very least, appear to have a measure of control over the situation and they can only do that with some measure of understanding. This isn't possible if the communication is too vague or high level, and giving them an overly technical message will only confuse them. So what do they need know?

They need to know four things:

1)Where service outage has occurred. This can be physically or geographically. "This is an outage with service X at location Y"
2)What the team is doing about it. "The engineers are performing diagnostics on the link to confirm it is not operational".
3)When the team will have it fixed or a work around available. This is a question which is most frequently asked. You are unlikely to know the answer to this question if a workaround is not readily available and if you do give Business a time at this point without a workaround, you are setting yourself up for failure. The best you provide is an estimate to how long further diagnostics will take.
4)When to expect the next communication. This should be agreed upfront with the business i.e. communication will be sent via this mechanism every 30 minutes.

Restoration

Once the service has been restored, a message should go out to the Key Stakeholders and via agreed channel, stating as such as well as briefly describing what was done to restore services. If there is no root causation at this point, it should be noted and communicated that further investigation will be undertaken to establish the root cause.

Post Incident Review

We will discuss this further in an upcoming article, but to summarise, after a Major Incident Business will want answers. A post incident review document should be supplied to Business, stating exactly what steps were taken and by who, as well as a detailed timeline of events and next steps, if any.

In summary, if we want to maintain a healthy trust relationship with Business, clear and transparent communication is always required. A Major Incident is one of the things that will test that relationship to the fullest. But if we practice the steps above, we can ensure that when the pressure is at its highest, that relationship will hold.