A crisis is a major, unpredictable
event that threatens to harm an organization and its stakeholders. Although
crisis events are unpredictable, they are not unexpected. Crises can affect all
segments of society – businesses, churches, educational institutions, families,
non-profits and the government and are caused by a wide range of reasons.
Although the definitions can vary greatly, three elements are common to most
definitions of crisis:
v A threat to the organization,
v The element of
surprise,
v A short decision time.
Sudden Crises, such as fires,
explosions, natural disasters, workplace violence, etc.; Smoldering Crises,
problems or issues that start out small and could be fixed or averted if
someone was paying attention or recognized the potential for trouble; a
one-of-a-kind crisis; and, Perceptual Crises.
The practice of crisis management
involves attempts to eliminate technological failure as well as the development
of formal communication systems to avoid or to manage crisis situations, and is
a discipline within the broader context of
management. Crisis management consists of skills and techniques required to
assess, understand, and cope with any serious situation, especially from the
moment it first occurs to the point that recovery procedures start.
Crisis management consists of
methods used to respond to both the reality and perception of crises such as a
Crisis Management Plan. Crisis management also involves establishing metrics to
define what scenarios constitute a crisis and should consequently trigger the
necessary response mechanisms. It consists of the communication that occurs
within the response phase of emergency management scenarios.
The related terms [emergency
management] and [business continuity management] focus respectively on the
prompt but short lived "first aid" type of response (e.g. putting the
fire out) and the longer term recovery and restoration phases (e.g. moving
operations to another site). Crisis is also a facet of [risk management],
although it is probably untrue to say that Crisis Management represents a
failure of Risk Management since it will never be possible to totally mitigate
the chances of catastrophes occurring.
Crisis management is occasionally
referred to as [incident management], although several industry specialists argue
that the term crisis management is more accurate.
Incident management
The
primary goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service
operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business
operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and
availability are maintained. ‘Normal service operation’ is defined here as
service operation within Service Level Agreement limits.
Objectives - Provide a consistent process
to track incidents that ensures:
v Incidents are properly
logged
v Incidents are properly
routed
v Incident status is
accurately reported
v Rank of unresolved
incidents is visible and reported
v Incidents are properly
prioritized and handled in the appropriate sequence
v Resolution Provided Meets
the Requirements of the service level agreement for the customer.
There are
three grades of Impact on Incident:
v Low
v Medium
v High
Target Times:
|
Priority
|
Target
|
|
|
Response
|
Resolve
|
|
|
3 - Low
|
24 hours
|
7 days*
|
|
2 - Medium
|
2 hours
|
2 days
|
|
1 - High
|
1 hour
|
5 hours
|
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