Have you ever encountered a situation where you needed to send that important email out to a customer to close a deal, only to have the email server going down at the same time?
This was what happened to Edward, a CEO in a company, who was about to send out an important email to a customer. Check out his sms conversation with his IT team after encountering this downtime.
Edward, the CEO, wanted to end his day with a high to close a deal with a customer. As he hit the send the button, Outlook replied to say that his email server is uncontactable. After a few tries, Edwards gave up and sms Ivan, his CIO.After receiving this SMS from the CEO, Ivan had to pacify his boss and colleague about the downtime.
Ivan had to find out the problem immediately and he fired an “arrow” over to Mike, his IT manager.
As it was about 5pm and only an hour more to end of office hours, the SMS from Ivan spoilt Mike’s day and Mike had no choice but to reply to his boss.
Like most bosses, especially when they were bombarded by their bosses, Ivan wanted and update from Mike just 10 minutes later.
Mike, who is in the mode to find the cause of the problem, is interrupted and has to reply to Ivan immediately. As IT managers, do you often yourself spending more time communicating the problem to your management than using the time to solve the problem?
When IT goes down, most users will panic. This is even so when you are under pressure from the boss. Here, you can see the blame game has began.
After finding the cause of the problem from Mike, Ivan had to reply to his boss Edward. If you noticed, the downtime has lasted 47 minutes. The cause of the problem has been identified but not solved.
Bosses often expect IT to run smoothly as any downtime could impact their revenue and customers. Downtime also affects the confidence of both internal and external parties.
As Edward had to endure 1 hour of IT downtime, he, of course, had to vent his frustration on the IT team.
