COVID-19 crisis management: Preventing and responding to system flaws

Erik Bernstein Crisis Prevention

Preventing issues where you can

Unprecedented volumes of email are slowing servers and crashing some systems.

Customer service lines for many businesses are completely overwhelmed no matter how well staffed they thought they were.

Websites are crashing, running erratically, and otherwise not performing as usual as a result of extremely heavy traffic.

What other systems might go down as this crisis grabs the world for any number of months? This is a time when your crisis management team needs to be discussing that topic and, if it all possible, getting ahead of it. Because it is going to take you more time, and cost you more money, if you wait until a system goes down. No one understood the magnitude of risk of a true pandemic – – but we no longer have any excuse for not taking it seriously now and into the future.

Here are the types of questions you can ask yourself:

  • What could go wrong and is there anything we can do now to prevent it or at least mitigate the impact if it happens?
  • If any critical system goes down, what is our back up plan?
  • What is the potential interruption in business for different type of system failures?
  • What are our weakest links?

Anticipate the flaws — and mitigate them!

Jonathan Bernstein
Founder & Chairman
jonathan@bernsteincrisismanagement.com