Crisis situation in IT outsourced environment is common if not frequent. It is more prevalent during the initial stages of the contract or relationship than in an established one. It is important to have a good crisis management team comprising of both sides ready to handle. It is again important to have this from ground up and have all the relevant players and keep it balanced with both client and providers representatives. Identify players who are mature, have prior experience, the knowledge and patience and the understanding of what this means to the business. Roping in Incident Management and problem management teams is important to manage crisis professionally, give it a sense of legitimacy while following the communication and reporting protocol.

The tendency to point fingers should be resisted. Immediate attention should be focused on managing the crisis and restoring normalcy. A lessons learnt is pertinent once the storm blows over.

Most often trivial situation get out of hand and become full blown crisis that need maturity in handling. The tendency to sweep under the carpet initially at the lower levels as the matter gets out of hand is not uncommon. The culture more so in Asian sub-continent is to wait till last minute to see if they can solve the issues is something that needs to be dealt with. It is good to stress an open environment to encourage reporting of situations that could become crisis in the near future and a take a toll on both sides. Keeping a close eye on risks that have become issues will help alleviate getting into crisis situations or atleast know the background when it does become one.

Developing and having an action plan in place to deal with crisis, with names and contact numbers, a toll free number to join, a identified representative who can play the role of ombudsman on both sides will save a lot of time and money when crisis does hit. Also important is to keep the plans utilized during past events with updates from lessons learnt to use it under similar circumstances.