How to Manage a Critical Incident

Critical incidents don’t come with a predetermined schedule or warning. So, it’s up to your organization to have an incident response procedure in place to combat these crisis. 

Don’t have one? Read below to perfect your incident response operations and adopt the right tools and procedures to fight against any critical event. 

Planning Phase

In order to respond appropriately to a critical incident, your organization needs to brainstorm and plan how an incident response tactic should look like. Let’s start with the planning phase with a step-by-step walkthrough to make this task easier.

Step One: Categorizing Alerts (High Versus Low-Priority Notifications)

As a first measure, your management team needs to prioritize critical alerts, determining which events require immediate attention. 

An incident alert management platform makes this easy through configurable alerts, allowing management to pick and choose notification priorities. 

Execution Phase

The second phase of your incident response playbook requires establishing effective protocols. Regardless of organization size, establishing procedures mitigates an incident’s impact on your business. 

Step Two: Learning About the Right Tools

Incident management teams need to gain insight into powerful alerting solutions. An ideal solution offers:

• On-call schedules – Determine who’s on call and select users through a digitized, intelligent scheduler
• Escalation procedures – Guarantee that if an on-call member is unavailable, the alert will be forwarded to the next on-call individual in-line
• Intrusive eight-hour alerts – Become immediately aware of critical notifications through distinguishable audible pings that differ from any other smartphone notification

Step Three: Adopting the Right Tools

It’s now time to put your emergency response tool belt to use. With a crisis or emergency, it’s always important that your organization has the proper tools in place. 

As mentioned, an incident alert management platform streamlines incident response operations, offering key capabilities including, but not limited to, message statuses, escalations and intrusive notifications. 

Additionally, a sound intelligent alerting platform is equipped with a web management console and secure smartphone application, allowing system administrators to better manage and respond to a critical incident. 

But, how can you have all of these tools at your disposal all at once? It’s easy. With an incident alert management solution such as OnPage, you can ensure that you’ll have the proper equipment ready to combat against a critical event.

How Did Your Team Perform? 

After an incident occurs, it’s vital for an organization to analyze and evaluate how the incident played out. This leads to step four of our playbook, giving your organization a detailed snapshot of your incident response performance.

Step Four: Post-Mortem Analysis and Reports

A sound post-mortem practice should include communication records, providing detailed information regarding your team’s incident communications. Ineffective or poor communications can then be improved for a future incident. 

OnPage’s threaded communications provide this level of detail, ensuring that incident response team members are always communicative and responsive. 

Essentially, OnPage’s reporting dashboard provides post-incident, downloadable reports. Management teams can review the data, discuss any issues that are constantly popping up and correct them to help improve incident alert performance. 

Lessons Learned

Your organization needs to understand that every incident that occurs is a learning curve. Fortunately, OnPage’s intelligent alerting solution makes incident response operations a stress-free task, ensuring that critical events are quickly resolved.