It was only a small fire....

Prevention is better than cure

We all know the power of effective communications in business. Conversely poor communications can have equally large impact but in a negative sense. Consider a scene that was played out some twenty plus years ago. My elder brother and I had reached a trustworthy [and legal] age where we could be left in charge of our parents house for a week while they took a hard earned first holiday alone. My heroic brother took the phone call from Mum when she landed at East Midlands airport on returning to ‘Good ‘ol Blighty’. Now, consider the crucial detail here – we were responsible enough to look after home for a week but still were incredibly naive in certain matters. I had caused the toaster to emit some minor wisps of what could have been described as ‘smoke’ during the week…I propelled the toaster to a safe spot in the garden to ‘chill out’ and all was well. I’m not just trivialising the sorry tale through guilt – it really was minor, honest!!! So, this was communicated to Mum over the phone. Three points to look for in terms of the ensuing communication:

• Wrong time
• Wrong place
• Wrong information

Well, wrong may not be the word – too much information may be. Anyway, enough digression and diversion, my brothers [far from] wise and [far from] learned opening gambit was to render those fateful words ‘Don’t worry Mum, it was only a small fire’. ‘FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!’ screams Mum down the phone in a packed airport terminal with obvious consequences…You can picture the scene – I’ll just keep cringing.

What’s the moral here? My sibling and I considered the incident (outage, you might say) as being hardly worthy of mention. On reflection, we were pleased with how we had handled it! In actual fact, the really important person (dearest Mother in this case but it could be a valued customer) in the transaction (verbal in this case but it could apply to the economic variety) considered it to be quite a major incident and we should have realised this from the start.

Don’t read me wrong here – I am not suggesting that burying the truth when things go pear shaped is the correct course of action. If things go wrong – see them as users do – MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE END OF THE WORLD.

This article is not about ‘solving’ the end of the world though – I’m going to help you prevent it.

I am going to describe common experiences with hosting partners, flaky backend systems and unacceptable behaviours on websites. I am going to introduce the idea of graceful degradation through intelligently designed systems that are built to withstand ‘issues’, that are aware of ‘issues’ and how to maintain a good level of service. I will lead on to the value of testing internally – users don’t do testing you know... I am going to advocate the use of strong procedures for configuration management and version control so that deployment does not become another project – it’s just a part of the current one isn’t it?

You will see how time and money can be saved, risk reduced, customer trust grows and most importantly users aren’t shouting ‘FIRE!’ in crowded public places.