Crisis Management By Harvard Business Review Press

Crisis Management By Harvard Business Review Press .

                   Here is the essence of this book  . Personally, i took a week to read this and got a couple of chances to apply my learnings to real life situations , it has helped indeed . I would narrate this with the help of an imaginary character called Snigdha.

Snigdha is an amateur DBA in Acme Inc. As any employee in Acme, she rarely gets to work. God has blessed her with a very good project where she gets to work very rarely. Every day she spends more time on checking the quality of her dressing style than quality of her work. Her manager, who started her career also at the same position as Snigdha, attributes the reason for minimal work in the project to her management skills. Snigdha’s manager rarely puts an effort impart new ideas in team and assess new technologies .Rarely the tickets resolving procedures and teams technical skills be cross verified . On fine bad morning, customer has lost half of his database. So customer raised a production down ticket to Acme Inc. Snigdha picked the ticket and read a one-liner “replicate the production database to test” . She gave a look as if it’s her one of those spam mails in her inbox . Unaware of the process to be followed for high priority tickets, she replicated development to production which wiped out whatever the little data customer has got. It took 10 hours from there on recover it completely back.  Quality team who never got a chance to review the quality of anything but quality of office interiors, suddenly had to review the quality of work done by Snigdha. As they never followed any standard quality check procedure nor do they have any metrics. They decided to postmortem the ticket. They exhorted the ticket out of database and started analyzing. Suddenly, people started looking at her work (ticket) as if its manuscript of Jesus Christ. To save their day, quality team has simply put all the blame on Snigdha for not paying attention and sends the analysis report to customer. The poor non-technical customer was heavily bombarded with technical jargon and was convinced that it was his mistake for not giving the requirements clearly. Further, Acme Inc. gave some action items to customer on improving the communication on such incidents in future. Looking at the concern of Acme towards them customer has awarded the contract to Acme Inc again .

Here is how crisis should have been handled better . As per author of this book , lifecycle of any crisis can be put into 8 of the following categories .

1     Identification of possible areas of crisis.

2     Prioritsing crisis based on impact.

3       Crisis contingency plan

4    Crisis containment.

5       Communication to media

6     Documentation.

Applying these principles to above story gives the following results.

1     Identification of possible areas of crisis.

                            One of the important skills for any manager should be identifying the signs of crisis. Crisis can be anything ranging from unkemptly designed ergonomic chair to office building not complaint with security measures.  In this case, Snigdha was never working or practicing as she did not get a chance; she never had any experience handling these sort of high pressure tickets. Quality team should have a clear metrics to assess quality of someone’s work. It was her manager’s responsibility to pick up these signs and to make sure that Snigdha was competent enough. Her manager should have picked up the sign early and trained team appropriately.

2      Prioritizing the crisis based on cost of impact

Crisis impact can be estimated with simple formula.

Value of crisis = Probability of occurrence X Cost of impact

In this case, cost of impact = 10 employees had to work 10 hours more to resolve issue

                                                    = 2000$(10X20X10)     

         Customer losing business for 8 hours = 10000$

Probability of occurrence= 0.1

Value of crisis = 0.4X (2000+10000)$

                         = 5000$

3 ) Crisis contingency plan

In case of a crisis there should be a crystal clear plan on who should be contacted for resolution. How should be contacted, what are the emergency contact number of key resources. How to organize a team and how and who should send communication to customer on the crisis updates. These should have been in place by the appropriate team.

If Snigdha doesn’t know how to perform the activity, she should have at least known whom to contact when she is struck.

5 ) Crisis containment.

It is not completely possible to avoid all the crisis . But having a proper backup plan or an insurance never hurts.

In this case if entire business is going down, the team should have at least pondered over the strategy to contain at beginning stage like routing traffic to another database server. Having a backup copy at offsite location would have surely helped.

 6 ) Communication to media.

In this case , who would get intouch with customer incase of crisis . Good way to deal with this is, Manager should have come to office to handle the situation and percolate the seriousness . To show exigency and convey the gravity of something it is always better if someone at top goes to site and address media or customer .

Before addressing media or customer the manger or CEO should guess to 5 question that could be posed and visualize the answers and the way to deliver those answers.

 Documentation

The crisis should have been documented properly. This would help really incase of future situations. So when the database is fully recovered the whole history log how the ticket was issued should have been properly documented.

Customer should also have documentation on how the issue is resolved and ways to improve the procedure in future.

Must read for all the managers ….!