If you have been around the IT industry for long, you've been involved in at least one big, gnarly escalation. Whether it's hardware, software, a service or product, something at some point will not go right and you'll be called upon to get things back on track. Following below are 10 behaviors that, when adopted, will make you and your organization look professional and earn trust while you search for resolution to the problem.
1. Confidence
You have to have confidence in yourself and your product. You have an initial budget of only so much trust, you can lose trust before you take a single action by seeming unconfident in your own or your product's capability.
2. Have a Plan
The best plans are simple to understand and communicate, and flexible enough to bend without having to start over. Identify actions, assign people, stay on track.
3. Take it Serious
This might be another workday to you, it could be the career of the people on the other end of the line. Act like it.
4. Enjoy It
You are in this situation because of a skill set or capability that makes you special. This situation requires concentrated competence, you've worked hard to get to this level, enjoy the fact that you get to showcase your skills.
5. Stay on Message and Remain Polite
You are here to help, you know how to fix the problem, the product will work or we will figure out a workaround. Keep reminding people of that. It seems that someone always wants to derail the situation and start assigning blame, staying on message keeps them at bay. Being polite while you do it keeps it professional.
6. Identify and Question Assumptions
Just because there are a lot of people involved doesn't mean all of the issues have been covered. Stop, review how the situation occurred, what's taken place since it started and then request and evaluate the data.
7. Be Fact Based
When you remove the assumptions, move forward with facts. Test theories within your plan that are based on facts and that will generate new factual evidence.
8. Set Priorities and Focus
You are trying to determine the first order effect that is causing the issue, the way to do that is through elimination. Attack the most likely issue first, even when it isn't the primary cause you eliminate a second order effect and reduce the list of possibilities.
9. Define the End Point Goal
What does success in this scenario look like? What is the desired outcome? It's surprising how often this is left defined as "better". This should be a hard metric like "X things per second", "Y milliseconds per operation", etc... You have to know what success look like.
10. Keep Track of What, How and Why
Most people will take notes, but not good ones. Take detailed notes, remember to add why actions were taken to avoid falling into the trap of repeating bad logic if something fails.
In addition to these 10 behaviors is the critical need to stick with it. Don't fall into the trap of shortcuts or desperate actions. Nothing will lose trust faster than long shot ideas. Once the issue is resolved, make sure you communicate why it occurred, how it was resolved, and how to avoid it in the future.
