Chapter 2 Get a Communication Strategy
It's important that your team know how and where to talk to one another and also how to talk to customers about any unfolding events.
Getting the team talking
Agree on a means for the team to speak; for distributed teams, IM clients such as Slack can work wonders and ensure that everyone is able to follow the story. Written communications are often better in the long term, as they’re less intrusive and provide great documentation to look back upon when building your postmortem.
Get your Slack channels set up in advance to save time and avoid confusion as to where people should go.
Get a Status Page
A great way to keep both your team and your customers informed during an incident is to run a status page. Doing so gives everyone a single place to follow the unfolding events and get the latest news on the progress.
You may want to use a dedicated service such as the one we provide for doing this, or you may want to roll your own. Either way, anchoring your story in a single place will ensure everyone has the same facts at their disposal.
Make sure everyone knows how to talk ‘status’
Saying anything is better than nothing, but make sure that anyone who is likely to speak with customers knows how to best put your story across. Get them to read our guide on writing the perfect status update.