Picture this: it’s the holiday season and it’s the first year you’ve been able to take two straight weeks off since you started your business.
You’ve earned it. After years of hard work, you’ve finally built a company that stands on its own two feet without you overseeing every little detail. The day before you leave, you cross everything you need to take care of off your checklist.
Holiday schedules are finalized. Customer service plans are in place. Every team knows what needs to happen to keep operations moving in your absence. Maybe you even get so bold as to turn off Teams notifications on your phone.
Then, halfway into your time off, an IT emergency happens. Usually, something like this would land on your plate, but what happens now, when it’s serious and you’re in another time zone?
Who’s keeping your network safe? Your systems operational? And who’s making the decisions when something goes wrong?
Before the holiday rush hits and employees leave for PTO, build a plan of action for keeping technology problems from turning into business disruptions.
Step 1: Decide who’s responsible when something goes wrong
The first and most important thing a business needs is a chain of responsibility. If you’re gone, who’s in charge? And what if that person is also out?
Even if the entire office is gone, somebody needs to be looking after your tech. This is where an IT service provider can help ensure problems don’t go unnoticed just because everyone’s unavailable.
Your plan needs to be more than writing down the phone number of who to call next.
A clear ownership plan will detail:
- Who is responsible for IT support throughout the holiday
- Backup contacts if the primary person is unavailable due to a planned or unplanned absence.
- What support is available outside of normal working hours
- How employees can report problems and ask for help
A prepared business should be able to confidently describe the processes for their holiday. When all responsibilities are clearly defined, everyone knows who to turn to when something goes wrong. This way, minor issues get taken care of instead of festering into extended disruptions.
Step 2: Decide how the problem gets addressed
Once you know who’s responsible for what, the next step is deciding how they’ll handle problems when they come up.
Not every issue is a DEFCON 1 problem in need of immediate, panicked intervention.
A printer refusing to cooperate doesn’t warrant the same response as a system outage that prevents customers from placing orders.
Treating everything with that much severity usually leads to the problem getting worse.
The person handling IT decisions will need to figure out:
- If any critical systems are impacted
- How quick the response needs to be
- When to escalate and who needs to be notified
- Who will monitor the situation until it’s resolved
When expectations are clear, employees can respond quickly and efficiently without succumbing to fear and chaos.
This is how successful businesses stay successful in periods of flux. Of course, problems will still happen, but a true response plan keeps them from becoming dangerous.
Step 3: Make sure the business can recover and keep moving
Congrats! Your team handled the emergency and nothing collapsed.
Now what?
Mitigating damage only gets a business so far. You need to recover. Especially if computers or servers had to be shut down to contain the problem, your team needs a clear plan for getting everything back up and running.
Once you know how your business will restore operations, you can set realistic expectations for staff and clients that everyone can rely on.
The expertise of an IT provider makes this step a lot simpler. Qualified professionals that know how to recover businesses can design backups and processes built for this exact situation.
Don’t leave IT coverage off the holiday schedule
You've already planned who's working, who's out and how your business will keep serving customers through the holidays.
Schedule a 10-minute discovery call and let’s set your IT up for a relaxing holiday with no last-minute catastrophes.
Call us at 913-948-6849 or visit our website https://micronetkc.com/discoverycall.
