After all those years of talk about crisis management, risk mitigation and disaster recovery, along came Covid-19 and the world was shocked, seemingly overnight, into making its plans a reality. For IT services teams, the 2020 pandemic meant swift action to firstly provision equipment and software and then to support the questions and needs of an office-based staff population as it transitioned to work from home. Logistics came to the fore, with identifying and keeping track of the location of assets, deliveries of equipment to home addresses and remote support of frequently disorientated home-workers. This infographic summarises the automation of crisis management in ITSM.
Many Sunrise customers had the knowledge in-house to adapt their ITSM software to take account of these changing working practices, creating Crisis Management dashboards and services that pooled tasks and assets linked by the common ground of the Covid crisis. This activity provided staff with day to day detail as well as management reports of impacts and implications financial or otherwise. A good example is the logistics service at North Wales Fire & Rescue Service, built with the Sunrise Graphical Process Engine.
One size rarely fits all of course, but a huge benefit or modern ITSM software design is the ability to provide service templates which go around 80% of the way to resolving a common issue, with GUI based customisation by the customer going the rest of the way. In light of issues raised by the pandemic, Sunrise has built a Crisis Management module for its ITSM tool and here we highlight via infographic the most common steps.
Firstly, visibility of tasks is important, via a single dashboard and sorted by priority and importance. Tasks can be assigned to individuals with priority guidance and target resolution date.
All open incidents easily referenced against the crisis, new tasks and incidents added in real time and tasks and incidents allocated to ensure prompt resolution.
Key staff can be attributed to your crisis management task group and the module allows the monitoring and change of staff status such as furlough, and its impact.
Knowledge, items and articles can be linked to the crisis while related suppliers are directly linked along with their full contact details.
As the situation changes, notifications and announcements can be sent to specific groups or all users, while reports are available in various formats for all stakeholders. These can be generated automatically for planning purposes and distributed by email.
For a fuller view of the crisis management module within Sunrise ITSM, watch the demo video.