Welcome to our blog series about the 8 Solutions to Resolve IT Incidents Faster. For the eighth IT incident in this series we will be looking at how to effectively communicate with internal and external groups outside of the IT team, ensuring that these communications occur as efficiently as possible.
How Can You Effectively Communicate with Groups Outside of the IT Team?
Welcome to our blog series about the 8 Solutions to Resolve IT Incidents Faster. For the eighth IT incident in this series we will be looking at how to effectively communicate with internal and external groups outside of the IT team, ensuring that these communications occur as efficiently as possible. HipLink Software has been the premier provider of software for wireless text and voice communication to global organizations of all sizes for over twenty years, and our experience and industry expertise makes us familiar with the ins and outs of IT incidents and the fastest solutions to those problems.
You have Difficulty Communicating with Executives, Internal Staff, and External Vendors.
If you are not currently using automation to escalate tasks when necessary, then you may find yourself often wondering who else on your team is capable of handling which tasks. This problem is one that often gets overlooked, but escalation paths are very important for resolving issues in an effective manner. You can learn more about HipLink’s Automated Alarm Management System here.
The Symptom
“Please set up a meeting with the executive team to assess the impact of this incident; we need to formulate our response to the media and clients.”
When incidents occur, it can be difficult and time-consuming meeting with different groups outside of the IT team to explain what has happened.
Why Does this Occur?
Often, the staff with the greatest understanding of an incident, its impact, and the estimated timeline for resolution, is the same staff that needs to describe these incident details outside of the IT team. Time taken to communicate about the incident to executives or other groups takes away from time spent resolving the incident, yet it is still critical and can’t be set aside.
What is the Solution?
Communication to groups outside of the IT team should be done as efficiently as possible. The best way to attain this efficiency is by using consistent systems and processes for incident communication to both IT and non-IT teams. Process consistency both inside and outside of IT saves critical time by preventing the need to communicate the same thing more than once.
Defining communication responsibilities in advance as part of your incident response plan and building those responsibilities into your automated alert system’s escalation paths will ensure that you don’t lose time and money while staff tries to sort out who is responsible for what.
Once you’ve identified staff that are responsible to communicating to different stakeholders and built your escalation automation to ping them at the right time, each of them are responsible for meeting in advance with the primary stakeholders they’ll be talking to when something goes wrong.
This way, your IT staff and the stakeholders can define the bottom line most important information and language external groups will need in the event of an outage or other IT-related incident. If you’re conducting good after action reviews and reporting (see #2 in this series), your IT staff and other stakeholder departments probably already have great data you can use to streamline communication next time.
In this scenario, each IT department designated communicator should have a backup and both should prepare model communication (press releases, alert notifications, presentations) ahead of time to share with stakeholders. It’s then-- not during the next event-- that stakeholders should talk to your team about what makes sense to them and what is or isn’t important.