Enterprise Incidents can take many forms, including customer issues, individual employees facing breakdowns, however categories like information security breaches or key enterprise systems going down, such as ERP, ITSM, supply chain, factory machines, or email can cause significant lost productivity and these Major Incidents can turn out to be very expensive, due to many factors including compliance and regulatory requirements and in some cases major damage to the corporate brand image.
For critical business services in large organizations, every minute of downtime equates to lost productivity, which has real dollar impact. When orders can’t be processed, products not getting shipped, customer support not able to answer queries, a production lines stop, or other situations where employees are unable to do their jobs due to a technology issue—the enterprise loses money and in some cases like healthcare or aviation lives may be at stake.
In such situations, How can organizations solve complex enterprise incidents as quickly as possible? Timeliness is essential both to minimize lost revenue and productivity. In today’s multisource landscapes resolving urgent, mission-critical types of issues / incidents requires collaboration. However, especially in this pandemic induced distributed working patterns, coordinating the efforts of employees—along with partners, suppliers, consultants or others outside the organization—who work remotely, are traveling, or are based remotely is a major challenge.
While we are living perhaps in the golden age of online collaboration tools (for functions like project management, video/Web conferencing, and file sharing), most of them are not designed for immediate, team-based urgent problem solving. Nor do they bring significant capabilities of incident management from a business value perspective i.e. restoring a service or system to its optimum as quickly as possible. Agility in Major Incident resolution and system restoration is vital to minimize the expense, disruption, and interruption of vital business functions.
A major incident often requires a conference bridge and I can tell you from experience that in a war room style approach, the Major Incident Management team needs to manually engage the right teams to work the issue / Incident, frequently sending out bridge numbers via SMS and email, requesting participants to join the bridge. And after all this efforts, if we are lucky, the major incident bridge would reach a quorum within 30-40 minutes after the incident was escalated. typically, some parties will join late and interrupt the call, adding maybe 10 more minutes before anyone could make real progress. The business frequently becomes frustrated with the delays and tends to continually call the IT Service Desk and the Major Incident Management team to get status updates which creates even more interruptions. With long resolution times and only reactive communication, IT Operations teams tend to feel always on the back foot.
Here comes the “tussom” approach to managing Major Incidents via a Agile War Room, implementing a Agile War Room tool enables organizations to make better, faster decisions in restoring vital services or resolving other significant Incidents more quickly while minimizing the costs of lost productivity, revenue, or opportunities.
All major incidents or outages even in the more proactive mature enterprise environments, require consistent processes and best practices that includes activities like
- The initial awareness
- Response team engagement while making sure relevant stakeholders are aware and have an informed context for working together to resolve the problem
- Triage and diagnostics with remediation and validation.
- History is also kept to ensure Post Incident Review and support the follow on problem management activities.
Agile war room enables organizations to quickly:
- Route relevant incoming issues directly to the war room by providing an option within the ticket itself.
- Form subgroups for each track of troubleshooting to develop potential resolutions.
- Providing Audio, Video, Chat and other collaboration natively within the ITSM solution itself.
- Document what’s learned in the war room for reuse in the future and for feedback to the rest of the team. Allow documents, screenshots and other vital information to be uploaded and shared.
- Keep impacted end users and other stakeholders updated near real time.
- Enable Subject matter experts to quickly get up to speed on what’s known and in progress.
- Allow tasks to be assigned and tracked.
- Provide near real-time communication from any geographically distributed devices.
- Maintain a record of communications and activities for later audit, diagnosis or training purposes.
Unlike a physical room or a conference call, the Major Incident Team can manage simultaneous conversations in tussom Agile War Room by dividing the written conversation into channels or threads. Because the conversation is documented in the collaboration platform, people who are joining the war room, can catch up quickly. This helps reduce the time to notify and engage resolution teams and get them investigating issues and restoring IT services faster. With tussom Agile War room assembling a conference bridge with all the necessary parties is painless and efficient—no more tedious distribution lists or long call trees.
Visit https://www.tussom.com, to get a free personalized demo and experience Agile war room feature and many other groundbreaking features to take your organizations service management to the next level.