General Crisis Response Planning

What is your number one priority?

If you are at the beginning of your crisis response planning, you need to brainstorm with other crisis response personnel about what systems or services your group can and cannot be expected to manage. Specify the EXACT systems you can be responsible for with a reduced staff of 4-6 people (the ride out team).

Tip: What are the core IT services that must be sustained or resuscitated during and after a crisis?

The services you identify will determine the personnel you must have on campus during the crisis as well as the levels of support other administrators can expect.

Example: If campus communications and infrastructure are on the core services list, the relief team is probably not going to have desktop support skills. Infrastructure ride out staff can't uninstall Vista on a crisis management team member's PC or get email working on a VP's phone. The CIO should communicate these specifics to other campus administrators who remain in place for the crisis. The desktop support people will be on the relief team. There will be computers that crashed and burned or have other serious problems all across campus, and you'll need all hands on deck after the crisis.

Who stays and who leaves?

Ride Out Team

"Ride out" means the team that is tasked to ride out the storm or crisis. It is much easier to understand in a hurricane situation. You can forecast the landing of the storm anywhere from 2-4 days in advance. Even if it turns at the last minute, you still must be prepared if the landfall site is going to affect your campus. As soon as the crisis window is declared ("the university will close at 6pm tonight"), the ride out team is dismissed from campus to go prepare their families, send them out of town to safe shelter, pack up their sleeping bags, toiletries, etc. for up to a 4-day stay. They have to be back in place on campus before the university closes to ride out the crisis. The systems you commit to supporting and/or restoring will determine the best people for the ride out team. Consider the personality and characteristics of the employees selected for the ride out team before finalizing the teams. Does your CIO really need to be on site? What specific skills does she or he have for keeping email running or for sustaining connections to the Internet? If the crisis inflicts injuries on your ride out team members, who will keep the organization and/or systems running in their absence?

Appendages to the Ride Out Team

Determine right now if your ride out team members' family, pets, or other appendages will be allowed on site during a planned crisis time frame. Specify how the ride out team will respond to friends, relatives or strangers who appear at the entrance to the building seeking shelter. If the people seeking shelter have an infant in their arms, will they be admitted? Do you have the infrastructure (food, flushing toilets, fresh water) to support uninvited guests through the crisis? Remember if an uninvited guest cries 24x7, the ride out team can't make rational decisions when they are sleep-deprived.

Relief Team

"Relief" team is the group that is required to return to campus as soon as the university is officially open, per announcements by administration. The relief team is not on campus during the crisis and is not responsible for resuscitating infrastructure immediately after the crisis has passed. Desktop support and communications staff are typically on the relief team. Although everyone who can make it back to work can be asked to do so, only about 25-30% of the staff is designated as relief and they have to be in a place to return to work on command regardless of their personal situation. For relief team members, it is best to send your family out of town, and even join them if you can be assured of getting back to campus with an 8-hour notice of relief team's return-to-work.