Unless you have one of those “lucky 8-balls” that we used to have when we were growing which you could shake and it would display a message in its window (“not very likely”), then you probably don’t have a good method for predicting the future. What you need is a plan for what your IT team needs to do when the unthinkable actually happens…
It’s Time For A Brainstorm
Let’s face it – you can’t possibly think of everything that might happen to your team. You can think of some things, but it’s going to take the input from the rest of your team in order to come up with a complete list of the possible crisis that you need to plan for.
The best way to go about doing this is to pull your team together into a brainstorming session. During this meeting allow everyone to come up with crisis scenarios and don’t initially reject any of them as being too far fetched. During this session you want to collect all possible ideas and you can sort them out later on
It Takes A Team To Manage A Crisis
When a crisis hits, your team is going to be under a great deal of stress. As an IT manager you need to realize this before the crisis hits and you need to come up with a plan that is going to allow them to deal with the crisis.
One way to do this is to take the time to set up a crisis-management team before a crisis hits. By creating teams to deal with different types of crisis (natural disaster, IT outage, company disaster, etc.) the members of your team will know their roles and therefore will know what to do.
Once assigned to a crisis-management team, your IT staff should take the time to create a plan for dealing with the future crisis. One piece of information that you should also be collecting is to identify any side effects of implementing your crisis plan – what could go wrong? Simply by taking the time to do this planning your team will be better situated to deal with the crisis when it comes.
What All Of This Means For You
IT managers need to take the Boy Scout motto to heart: “Be Prepared”. This means that although none of us can predict what the future holds for us, we can at least take the time to prepare for the next crisis.
This means working with your team to brainstorm the possible crisis that could strike your team. This is a good way to prevent problems before they happen. You can’t be expected to do it all once a crisis hits. That’s why you need to establish a crisis management team. This will help every member of your team to know their roll when a crisis hits.
Perhaps someday we’ll have the ability to accurately see into the future. However, until that day comes IT managers will need to take the time to prepare for crisis that we know will happen someday. Those IT managers who prepare for the worst are the ones who are able to make it through to the other side.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™
Question For You: How much of your time each month do you think that you should spend on crisis planning?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
IT managers are asked to do a lot of things during the average day: recruit new workers, keep the ones that they already have, resolve disputes, etc. The one thing that they also need to be doing every day is probably the thing that gets overlooked all too often: manage their careers.