How To Deal With A Major Tech Crisis

As an entrepreneur or leader of an organization, chances are you deal with ‘mini crisis’ situations regularly. Crisis management comes with the territory, but how do you respond when something terrible happens to the tech your company primarily depends on or there has been a hack into your system?

During a crisis, some leaders rise to meet the issue head on while others freeze with uncertainty. These crisis events sometimes effect an individual operational system. Other times, they impact large-scale transformation programs, which can wreak havoc on your organization’s reputation.

So being able to manage through a crisis is part and parcel of your role.

1. Plan for the worst

It is essential to start with a comprehensive plan even before there is a glitch in the system. When procuring any tech or software for your business, ask about risks factors and breeches.  You will always find that there are some unforeseen elements that come up in a crisis, but building this crisis management plan means that there is a common understanding that can be used and all team members are knowledgeable of what to do in a tech emergency.

You can make always adjustments to a plan when there is new information available, but not having a starting position is reckless.

An efficient plan must address common crisis situations and provide confidence to, team members, customers and stakeholders (if applicable). In the middle of a crisis is not the time to start crafting a risk plan because a lot of people don’t make good decisions under stress.

Oh, don’t forget to ‘test’ this plan to ensure that it actually works as expected.

 

2. Get the facts

The real reasons for a crisis are not always apparent. A crisis team has to be activated and the plan invoked to tackle the event. In the plan, the team has already identified the ideal candidates with business responsibility and profile to avoid any delays in decision making.

The crisis leader – who in some cases is you – will need get the broader team to investigate the specific issue and determine root cause. During a crisis, it’s often the case that symptoms are reported first that are not directly related to the actual issue.

This will usually require a cross-functional team that have the requisite knowledge and competencies. Be sure to reinforce that no communications both internal and especially external are to be made without your express approval. This is when you need to have the media trained staff to take the ‘stand-by’ statements and start to draft potential responses.

If all tech platforms are outsourced and not inhouse, the crisis leader will act as a single point contact person to the outsourced platform support team. This minimizes confusion or inaccurate reporting of issues.

3. Establish a war room/command center.

This is a location that you have already established as the rallying point in case of a business emergency. When a crisis occurs, you will always want your team to be co-located at the same site, in person or remotely. Ideally, the war room will need to have appropriate technology (telephones, WiFi, printers, projectors) along with white boards and butcher paper.

Ideally, you have the crisis management plan projected onto a wall for all to see and a second projector that shows the log of events. This level of transparency will be critical to enable all the team to track progress and ensure that information is widely shared.

The war room should remain as open around-the-clock during the crisis as possible.

4. Set the tone

The team is looking to you at this time of crisis. Now is not the time to start looking for a scapegoat or to heap blame.

Sometimes, the people working on the issue may also be the same staff who are responsible for the issue that occurred. To have them worried about repercussions is not going to create the appropriate mood. Remember that you set the tone with the business; be calm and confident but at the same time concerned and communicative.

5. Communicate often

As previously established, you set the tone by communicating at all times – this is your key role. Create a checklist for notifying clients. As soon as you become aware of a major crisis, notify the appropriate team members. A major crisis has potential negative external impact so this requires your absolute attention.

6. Restore services

After your crisis is averted, it is necessary to perform a comprehensive checking and validation sequence to understand the real impacts, and what other unintended issues have been created by this crisis. The impact on IT operations is now over but business operations issues are mounting up and it’s time to turn your attention to finalizing the ‘root cause’ analysis.

7. Do an ‘after action review’

The classic ‘after action review’ should answer the following:

• What was supposed to happen? – IT risk management plan
• What actually happened? – what actions actually mitigated the risk
• Why did this occur? – root cause of the issue
• Do we need to update our risk protocol?

I strongly advice that within 10 days of the crisis the team convenes to review any lessons learned. This is often a very painful exercise and needs to be completed and then reported back per the business governance protocol.

In truth, it is impossible to avoid a major IT crisis. Like I said upfront, transformational activities will create opportunities for this to occur. We should embrace and welcome these shifts as they can drive positive change into the enterprise.