Hotsites

The management of chaos.

A hotsite is basically the management of leaders in a downtime situation.

When a system is down and the company is losing money--the heavy hitters are called in.  Each expert is voicing their opinion and trying to give helpful advice.  Their intentions are good, but they are relying too much on hunches.  You will know that it is chaos when several new attempts to fix the problem fail miserably.

Each person involved is the leader of their group--it is difficult to lead leaders.  What you need is data.  You will drive the collection of data and use the data to make decisions.

The hotsite manager maintains the list of issues and coordinates the next steps.

For every issue, you collect:

• An item number
• A ticket number if you have an issue tracking system
• Concise problem description
• Hostname of last occurence
• Date of last occurence
• Frequency of occurences (i.e, hourly, daily, weekly, etc.
• Priority
• Action Item Owner
• Action Item Description (i.e., what to do next)
• Analysis (what is known about the issue, identifying characteristics)
• Problem Type (bug, configuration, etc)

The hotsite is managed from the list.  Changes are only those that are next steps on the list.  The next steps are discussed in meetings with all of the leaders and driven from the data.

The key elements of a successful hotsite are:

1. Maintain composure
2. Only use data to drive next steps.
3. Enforce that the only action items that should be completed are the ones listed on the hotsite spreadsheet.
4. Use the issue list and communicate it frequently to all participants. This may mean daily meetings or conference calls.

Download a starter hotsite spreadsheet here.