How to deal with emergency changes in the IT department?

Every business has its plans for almost every possible thing that can go wrong, but you can not plan everything. Once in a while, there will be an emergency issue with your IT department or something wrong with the server, which will require you to make some quick decisions. Emergency changes to any system are nearly always a risk. In any instance, emergency coding is scary because panic can lead to some terrible mistakes. To help, here are three tips to consider and apply before committing to an emergency change protocol.

1. Assess the status of emergency

Any emergency is relatable to the medical industry, so the first rule of an emergency change is to do no harm. What you can do is request the changes you are about to make and assess what will happen if you don’t do it at all. The question requires both business and technical input. If properly addressed, it will clarify a lot of things about you. The answer is looking to go forward is potentially stopping the current emergency from being a big emergency by making some changes that can reduce it to a low-risk level.

2. No hasty decisions

Albert Einstein once said- If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and five minutes finding the solution.

Similarly, in case of an emergency, you must set a time frame for the decision to be made and then utilize that time to the maximum to figure out the best possible solution. Assess the damages the emergency situation can cause, and when it will happen, or the latest time a change would need to be made to prevent some damage from happening. After fixing a decision window, make the best use of the available time as it prevents you from rushing into a solution that might cost your organization on multiple levels.

3. Preparation for handling emergency changes

While the above two approaches are a must-do for anyone making a decision in an emergency situation and authorizing changes. There is still much more that you can do to protect your organization from possible risks. Sometimes it is to start with a status-checking question or determining a time frame for the associated decision making whatever the nature of the emergency.

But emergency change authorization is not a designation at a company; neither does it has a defined skill set requirement. What can be done is to prepare people to handle and an emergency change situation. The need to educate and train people on emergency change handling and potentially test them through simulations is evident because emergencies don’t knock; they just appear in front of you. It will be utterly beneficial for an organization to suitably prepare people to deal with emergency changes.