Your team is accused of causing network downtime. How do you navigate the blame game effectively?
If your team faces accusations of causing network downtime, it's crucial to handle the situation with transparency and accountability. Here's how you can navigate the blame game effectively:
How would you handle a similar situation in your organization? Share your strategies.
Your team is accused of causing network downtime. How do you navigate the blame game effectively?
If your team faces accusations of causing network downtime, it's crucial to handle the situation with transparency and accountability. Here's how you can navigate the blame game effectively:
How would you handle a similar situation in your organization? Share your strategies.
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Horribly framed question. Blame should not be a factor in an outage. There are opportunities to improve in tooling, detection, mitigation, processes. You take or give ownership of an issue, not assign blame.
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1 mln question 😄 💵 what I'd suggest: ACKNOWLEDGE THE ISSUE QUICKLY 🤭 Take responsibility to address the issue without assigning blame. This helps to defuse tension. Collect Data & Evidence: Present a clear, data-driven timeline of events to show how and when the issue started, isolating root causes. Focus on Solutions: Shift the conversation from blame to resolution. Propose actionable steps to prevent future incidents & improve the network’s resilience. ( Drive WIN-WIN mindset) Collaborate, Don’t Confront: Engage with relevant teams to understand their perspective. After the issue is resolved, document lessons learned & put preventive measures in place, fostering a culture of continuous improvement 🙌 😎
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If your team cause the network outage, taking accountability for you and your team is essential. Get an understanding of what happened, fix it in ample time, then jot down the fix in a contingency plan if it isn't documented and note lessons learned from the incident. You should also communicate to your team these lessons learned to minimize repeats.
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1. Investigate: Determine the true cause of the downtime. 2. Communicate: Be transparent about your findings and any actions taken. 3. Focus on solutions: Prioritize fixing the issue and preventing future occurrences. 4. Learn: Analyze the incident to improve future performance.
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Quickly verify there is a problem.(there should be monitoring) Investigate the scope of the problem via premade network test scripts, filling in the blanks on devices that show issues. Depending on SLA deeply diagnose issues and gain a root cause. If sla doesn’t allow quickly fix the issue quickly and piece it together afterwards. Own up to the issue if you are at fault and come up with a plan to mitigate the outage in the future.
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Once you have investigated and identified the cause of the outage, if this is caused by your team then taking accountability is paramount. In our specific industry, it's all about trust, and if you want to build a successful partnership then all parties involved must trust each other. Trust that if there is an outage, it will be remediated as soon as possible and communicated effectively. 'Blame game' culture should be shunned immediately.
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Own the problem up front, if my network team is the responsible party. Offer tools to better manage the up status of networking devices, to include recommendations of hardware that will increase reliability.
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RCA - Radically Conclusive Answering 😇 that can make everyone agree on the output. Need to have very precise timeline with screenshots and relevant details to make sure we can Justify them appropriately.
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Own Responsibility if Necessary Admit fault if justified: If your team is at fault, acknowledge it and outline corrective actions to prevent recurrence. Highlight accountability culture: Emphasize that learning from mistakes strengthens overall network resilience Shift to Prevention Conduct a post-mortem: Review the incident to identify root causes and gaps in processes. Implement changes: Suggest updated monitoring tools, training, or process improvements to avoid future downtime. By focusing on facts, collaboration, and solutions, you can defuse the blame game, protect your team’s reputation, and contribute to long-term network reliability.
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Determine the root cause / owner, analyse and fix the issue, acknowledge the error and learn lessons to avoid future occurrence. Transparency is important, and blame game is not an option here. Also, bringing up the network is first priority. Responsible party needs to adequately be re-assured how breach of contracted SLAs can come with consequences, especially if this outage is on customer networks. Simply escalate case to responsible party with clear analysis / investigation result if the outage isn't caused by the team.
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