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Ext. PublicationThe Fix-It Framework: A Playbook for Untangling Tech Chaos | Podcast
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On this Weaver: Beyond the Numbers episode, our host Morgan Page offers a six-step framework to ensure technology issues are resolved efficiently, from establishing cross-functional response teams to building preventative measures.
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Detailed Description of Weaver: Beyond the Numbers, A Playbook for Untangling Tech Chaos
00:00:00
Morgan: Today, we’re going to talk about your fix-it framework for when technology goes wrong.
00:00:06
Morgan: A parallel I want to draw. When we talk about our physical buildings, if half of your building fell sideways, collapsed on the ground, nobody was hurt miraculously, how would you solve that?
00:00:21
Morgan: You probably have an incident response playbook. You probably have an immediate practice of fielding. How are we going to get people to continue their work? How are we going to bring in generators? And how are we going to manage all of these physical issues?
00:00:36
Morgan: So let me ask you this: Why do you not have that playbook for your technology?
What happens if the core technology for your business that drives your business stops? Do you have a playbook to solve it? Maybe not.
00:00:51
Morgan: But today, we’re going to give you a few tips around it. When we think about solving our technology problems, the first thing we want to talk about is the anatomy of our tech mess.
Your technology messes, unfortunately, are not like a single building. They span massive domains of expertise. And so, depending on how your technology fails, if it’s your ERP [enterprise resource planning], it may fail across two, four, seven different domains and each component of that failure might be different.
00:01:25
Morgan: And so, you want to have a process to field a cross functional team to be able to dig into this failure to make sure not only is the failure addressed, but it is addressed in all ways it was experienced.
The next is what’s your fix-it framework? What is the playbook that you’re going to pull out whenever it fails so you have repeatability in the way you address it? And more importantly, monitorability to go, did we address this the best way possible? And maybe is there something we should change going forward?
00:01:59
Morgan: Couple of tips I want to give you today. Really a six-step playbook. First one, I already gave you a little bit of insight in: cross functional response teams. These are key.
Get outside of just the IT ecosystem, but make sure there’s designated power users that in the event of a failure and it’s in their domain of experience that you’re able to pull them in quickly and say this fail, how did you experience it? How did IT experience it? And draw those connections between the functional and the technical.
00:02:30
Morgan: Number two, establishing your no blame zone. Y’all, we can talk about whose fault it was all we want, but it doesn’t fix the problem.
So, when you’re in crisis mode, fix the problem. We can blame later.
00:02:44
Morgan: Number three, map your tech terrain. So, whenever we’re talking about the incident, we have to have clarity of insight.
If half our building fell, we would rope off the area that’s broken. We would rope off the hallways that are severed. You need to do the same thing with your technology. Say, floor six through nine have disappeared because they fell off the side of the building.
Technologies x, y and z are gone because they’re part of this failure. Mapping your tech terrain.
00:03:17
Morgan: And then four, assigning a resolution lead. These things can’t be resolved by committee. And so, making sure you’ve got one person, one point of contact that’s assigned both the responsibility and the authority to drive it to completion.
00:03:34
Morgan: And then five, you want to document and debrief. And so, understanding what went wrong, making sure it’s written down so that way it’s not just living in everyone’s head.
Verbal communication is an imperfect medium and envisioning how these things went wrong oftentimes can lead to conflicting understandings because we’re all envisioning it from different perspectives.
So, making sure that it’s written down, making sure that it’s debriefed with the broader team, and so everybody has an opportunity to share and incorporate their perspective to create a holistic understanding of the failure.
00:04:15
Morgan: And finally, build your preventative guardrails. And so, looking at, this happened, we’re fixing it.
After the fact, we need to go back and go, how do we keep this from happening again? What new guardrails do we need to implement to prevent it?
00:04:32
Morgan: And so, one of the examples I want to use for y’all of someone who does this very well is Shopify. Shopify has a technology incident command group because when their technology system goes down, it has a dramatic impact on their bottom line. And so, they need to have it up and ready.
So just like a physical incident command post, considering what is a digital incident command post look like for my organization.
00:05:00
Morgan: I appreciate you listening to me. As always, drop me a note if there’s a topic y’all would love to hear about. Y’all take care.
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