A clear incident response plan is essential to managing system outages efficiently. Automated monitoring and alerts detect issues early, ensuring the team isn’t scrambling blindly. During an outage, quick wins should be the priority—restoring critical functionality while working toward a permanent fix. Transparent communication with stakeholders manages expectations and keeps everyone informed. Primary hurdle is staying calm under pressure while making fast, effective decisions. Teams must balance immediate fixes with long-term solutions, all while handling frustrated users and leadership demands. Once resolved, Retrospective analysis helps prevent repeat failures. Each incident is a chance to refine processes & boost future response times.

It's all about communication. Let everyone know the plan to deal with the issue and how it impacts the release. Provide all the data available to make good decisions on what to do next. I have come across the all too common scenario where people feel they will get everything planned while dealing with a production issue. Time is a resource that cannot be created and after understanding that dialogue on what to do becomes easier.

Prioritize by immediately identifying and focusing on restoring the systems that have the most significant impact on business operations and customer experience. Address these critical areas first to minimize disruption and maintain essential services.

From my perspective one thing that seems to work universally is ruthlessly focusing on what restores core functionality fastest. For example, if your outage is tanking a customer-facing service, that’s priority one over, say, an internal reporting tool. I’ve seen teams get bogged down trying to fix everything at once, and it just turns into chaos.

You focus on the outage? This should be elementary, but if there is a urgent system outage, you should be focused on that, most other items can be deprioritized. Put up a butter bar, or some type of comm, saying your focused on the outage, and then focus on the outage! Most people dont read, so your not going to catch everyone, however some communication is better than none. IT is one of those worlds that doesnt really care how stretched thin you are it has to be dealt with. So deal with it.