We’re moving into the latter half of the year, which for Florida – where I live – means hurricane season is nearly upon us. Other parts of the country have tornados, earthquakes, blizzards, and other natural disasters. Then there are the man-made crisis of malware, ransomware, denial of service, or other malicious activity that can impact our ability to do business.
So how do we deal with these things? The most important thing is to be prepared. Do you have a clearly documented business continuation plan? It’s probably no surprise to anyone that most businesses, including really big ones in the Fortune 500, don’t really have a well documented, effective way to recover from a disaster. I’m going to detail here some of the things that you need to have in place in order to properly respond to an outage.
First, we need to define what sort of event would initiate the business continuation plan (BCP). These sort of events can range from a department outage to a site closure to a widespread issue encompassing the entire company. The recovery plan needs to be able to accommodate any of them, and the response to each would be different.
One way to approach it is to create and define crisis levels. For example:
- Priority 3 – single-point failure of a key application, mission-critical tool, or business function.
- Priority 2 – multiple-point failure of a key application, or a single site is entirely down (in a multi-site organization), or a critical process has failed.
- Priority 1 – multiple sites are down, or a critical app or function has failed across the entire enterprise.
Depending on the size or scope of the organization there may be additional priorities that further break down the severity of an event.
Each of these scenarios would have an associated checklist readily available to a select group of individual making up a recovery team. The recovery team should be made up of people who cross all business and IT functions, have high availability, and be given the ability to make decisions on behalf of the greater organization to address business continuity. The makeup of this group should be reviewed on a regular basis; I would suggest quarterly at the very least.
So what sort of things need to be documented in a business continuation plan? Stay tuned here next week for more on the subject!
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Last week I touched on how to best communicate with you
team, peers, and leadership. The final two
were communication with customers. And I’ll
close with some basic advice for all areas.
Internal Customers
These are the people outside of IT within your company,
those that use your products or services.
Keep in mind that as part of the same business, your broader goals should
be aligned. If your company provides,
say, a financial or healthcare service, then the support we provide our
internal customers should reflect our desire to help them provide the best
service they can and we should understand that keeping them informed contributes
to the overall success of the company.
If there’s going to be some down time for maintenance, communicate that
proactively, along with how long it will take, when you expect things to be
working again, and that you have a strategy if things don’t go according to
plan.
If you’re in a position to provide technology, spend time
and get to know your peers on the business side. Sit in on their staff meetings from time to
time if possible, or set up regular one-on-ones with them so you stay informed
of their needs, problems, and goals. If
you have the opportunity to provide a solution via technology, you have a quick
and easy avenue to do it so long as you’re proactively involved and communicating
with them. Eventually, they’ll start to
understand your desire to help and will start proactively communicating back to
you!
External Customers
If you provide IT services to customers that are not part of
your company, similar communication is needed.
As with internal staff, external customers need to know well in advance
if there is scheduled maintenance; or if there’s unscheduled downtime they need
an assurance of when the problem will be resolved and what will happen to
prevent future issues. And in these
cases, there’s no such thing as too much communication! Think of your own experiences with service
providers who have left you hanging with no updates on when, or even if, a
service would be available.
Finally, I’d like to just offer some general advice for all
levels and types of communication.
A key, important thing to remember is that whatever you
communicate, it’s vital to be accurate in what you’re stating. If you’re referring to a white paper, study,
or specific fact, be prepared to validate that the information is accurate and
up-to-date. Make sure the source is
trustworthy; for example, Wikipedia is something often used as source material,
but as that can be changed by almost anyone you should never assume something
found there is correct without the corroborating links or facts.
Context matter as well.
We live in a time where the sound bite is king, but when you’re
communicating for business you need to take care not to exaggerate. Avoid broad statements, like ‘a majority of
people’ or ‘literally’ if you don’t know the actual data. In my years of being in leadership roles, I’ve
seen data manipulated in some crazy ways to make a point.
The ability to communicate verbally and with the written
word is an important part of being in a leadership position. Like anything, it takes work, but ultimately
it will pay off!
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I’ve been in various management or leadership roles for many years, and one thing I’ve consistently tried to mentor my managers in is effective communication. Over that time, I’ve had folks who struggled with enough communication and others who really over-commun-icated. How you pass on information in a business environment very much depends on who you’re talking to – which from my perspective really breaks down into five areas:
- Your team (people who report to you).
- Your peers (people in your organization at your
level).
- Your leadership (people you report to).
- Internal customers (people within the company
who use your products/services).
- External customers (people outside the company
who use your products/services).
There are nuances for each of these, but broadly this covers
the types. Your style of communication will
need to change depending on the audience.
To keep this relatively short, this post will focus on the first three. Following blogs will pick up on the last two.
Your Team
As leaders, we have accountabilities to our own management
as well as the business as a whole. We
are responsible for the performance of our team, and should always be willing
to step up to that responsibility when things don’t go as we planned. You are the face of your team to your
leadership, and they and your team will respect you more if you don’t ‘pass the
buck’ if a deliverable is missed or an initiative fails.
So, in order for your team to deliver, they need to know
what’s expected of them. The type of
communication to your managers and their staff should clearly and with as much
detail as possible lay out the strategic direction, specific deliverables (with
deadlines!), and why what they’re doing is important to the success of the
business. Often, we overlook that last
part – for example, an IT support team can get very focused on simply assigning
and working tickets, and forget that for every person that’s down due to system
issues there’s a financial impact to the company, or a negative hit on customer
satisfaction (internal or external). It
helps when our teams know not just what they have to do every day, but why what
they do matters.
This is not a ‘one and done’ thing, either. Regular one-on-ones, staff meetings, or
stand-up meetings are a priority to keep everyone aligned on the strategic
direction as well as promote internal discussion and improve the overall
culture and morale of the team. I’ve
always felt that 75% of being a good leader was simply building good relationships
with the team. It’s been said before –
your success as a leader is dependent upon the performance of the people who
work for you, so they need to now everything possible to aid them in
succeeding.
Your Peers
You’re almost always going to have other managers or leaders
at your level that you need to work with to be successful. How well you communicate with them, building
those relationships, means a lot to your overall success. Keep in mind, everyone works for the same
company, and everyone has the common goal of making the business
successful. Other teams need to know
what your strategic objectives are, and you need to know and understand
theirs. Too often over the years I’ve
seen situations where different teams were unknowingly working to solve the same
problems. Once they would find out that
others were working on it, rather than talking and teaming together, it felt
like they were at odds with each other.
They forget the common goals and focus on being territorial. A good leader is always willing to compromise
and find common ground.
How often do you talk to your peers? Is it only during your leader’s staff
meetings, or when you need something?
Building a rapport with them builds bridges that can make everyone
successful.
Your Management
This can be a challenging area, as everyone is different in
what they may expect. Some leaders are hands-off,
letting their team address issues as they see fit. They only need regular updates on how things
are running or where a deliverable is against its deadline. Other managers are very much hands-on, desiring
a lot of detail and wanting to understand the nuances of each project, see the
metrics on how the teams are performing, and closely monitor all of their
direct reports.
You’ll need to tailor your communication to your manager’s
expectations. Most (not all) that I’ve
worked with prefer brief summaries of what’s going on within your organization. They’re frequently very busy, have their own
accountabilities to the senior staff, and so need to be able to quickly cover
at a high level the overall performance of their group.
As a manager, you have to be able to distill a lot of information coming from your team down into basically sound bites that quickly but accurately describes metrics, progress, or roadblocks. Avoid generalities, and focus on hard data whenever possible. Don’t overwhelm with numbers (unless you have a boss that likes all of the background data!), but highlight the key performance indicators for your team.
This has been a longer post than usual, and if you’ve made it this far I appreciate it! Communication is one of the most important things we do as leaders, and understanding how we need to adjust our style depending on the audience is critical. Next time, we’ll look at the last two areas as well as some general advice on how to be accurate and convincing.
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