In recent years, the business landscape has shifted considerably, driven by economic, political and social instability. Crisis management teams continue to deal with frequent, severe crises, even as working conditions have evolved through the pandemic and subsequent rise of hybrid work.
Meanwhile, increasing complexity and high consumer expectations have also challenged incident management teams that must respond to digital crises. So, as incident management professionals, what can we learn from the way crisis management teams operate, and how can this be applied to how organizations handle day-to-day incident management?
What Is Crisis Management?
Crisis management and IT incident management share a lot of common terms and concepts. But while these teams both deal with resolving business problems, their scope is significantly different.
Incident management is often on a more focused digital scale. Every individual incident requires a response, and they don’t always escalate to become crises. Incident management is action-oriented and is a technical and tactical exercise. For example, site reliability engineering practices for incident management typically prioritize restoring service availability, with customer communication happening if the incident affects customers and diagnosing the cause after the service is restored.
Crisis management, on the other hand, serves as an extension of major incident management, when material business or organizational impact is at stake. Its underlying cause, however, is often outside of the organization’s control — a natural disaster, a supply-chain disruption or breaking news. As such, crisis management must include more intangible effects of crises: reputation management, trust restoration and risk assessment. This communication-focused, strategic approach is a vital part of the way a business responds to a crisis and provides three vital lessons for incident management teams.
1. How To Make Good Decisions
Making decisions in a crisis is extremely challenging, especially when a business’ reputation is on the line. For incident management teams, which must make rapid decisions to stop incidents from escalating, this is even more difficult.
Crisis management teams can focus on making good decisions in critical moments when the processes and practices to follow in a crisis are automated. Rather than spending decision-making cycles about who should be involved, who should be informed and other checkpoints during an ongoing crisis, teams can focus on key decisions when those workflows have been defined and automated.
This need for automated workflows extends beyond crisis management and incident management. Consistent, repeatable workflows power many teams across a wide array of industries to help them with their decision-making process. This allows them to prioritize urgent tasks, avoid operational paralysis and contribute to the smooth day-to-day running of their business.
2. How To Solve Problems With Effective Communication
Successful crisis management teams will be able to effectively prioritize and manage their operations to mitigate the problems caused by crises as they arise. These teams implement effective communication strategies that allow them to respond to and manage critical issues as soon as they become an issue to prevent crises from spiraling.
In these scenarios, it is vital that all communication is clear, timely and has a purpose. Crisis communication includes external communication focused on brand reputation management and communicating with vital stakeholders, such as the public and shareholders. Internal communications are also vital for crisis response management, particularly for crises that affect employee populations, like natural disasters, security threats or infectious disease outbreaks. Crisis management teams understand the need for effective communication and are able to use it to allay fears to manage major incidents.
Similarly, incident management communication includes internal communications and focuses on coordinating the response effort among stakeholders and ensuring they have the information they need to implement fixes. If an incident affects customers, customer communications is vital as well, including real-time information for customer support teams, public status pages or private status pages for critical customers and supply-chain partners.
Despite being part of the back office, incident management teams must learn to write and implement their communication plans with the same rigor as any external-facing crisis response team. This ensures that roles and responsibilities are divided effectively, meaning that incidents can be rapidly resolved and reduces customer frustration.
3. How To Stay Resilient, Whatever May…
Read More: What Can Incident Teams Learn From Crisis Management?