Efficiently Provide Updates during an Ongoing Incident Outage
Question
Your company follows Site Reliability Engineering practices.
You are the person in charge of Communications for a large, ongoing incident affecting your customer-facing applications.
There is still no estimated time for a resolution of the outage.
You are receiving emails from internal stakeholders who want updates on the outage, as well as emails from customers who want to know what is happening.
You want to efficiently provide updates to everyone affected by the outage.
What should you do?
Answers
Explanations
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A. B. C. D.C.
As the person in charge of Communications for a large, ongoing incident affecting customer-facing applications, it is important to efficiently provide updates to all affected stakeholders. This is particularly important since the incident is ongoing, and there is no estimated time for resolution of the outage.
Option A suggests focusing on responding to internal stakeholders at least every 30 minutes while committing to the next update times. This option is useful since it recognizes the importance of communicating with internal stakeholders and providing regular updates. However, it does not explicitly address how to provide updates to customers, who are also affected by the outage.
Option B suggests providing periodic updates to all stakeholders in a timely manner, committing to a next update time in all communications. This option is a more comprehensive approach that recognizes the importance of communicating with both internal stakeholders and customers. By committing to a next update time in all communications, it ensures that stakeholders have an idea of when to expect the next update, which helps manage expectations.
Option C suggests delegating the responding to internal stakeholder emails to another member of the Incident Response Team and focusing on providing responses directly to customers. This option is useful in situations where there are limited resources, and there is a need to prioritize communication efforts. However, it assumes that there is another member of the Incident Response Team available to handle the internal stakeholders' emails.
Option D suggests providing all internal stakeholder emails to the Incident Commander, who can manage internal communications, while focusing on providing responses directly to customers. This option assumes that there is an Incident Commander in place and recognizes the importance of having a central point of communication for internal stakeholders. However, it may not be the most efficient approach since it adds another layer of communication that can slow down the response time.
Overall, Option B is the most comprehensive approach as it recognizes the importance of communicating with both internal stakeholders and customers, commits to next update times in all communications, and ensures that stakeholders have an idea of when to expect the next update.
