By Stephen Alfano, PMP®, CSM, Prosci 

There is no sure-fire way of predicting when (or how) a crisis will occur in an organization or a business environment. Crises, by their very nature, are all too often unpredictable and all-consuming events. 

However, with the practice of risk management, organizations and business leaders can assess potential crises and quantify their ensuing impact. More important, they can use the assessments to create mitigation plans to prepare for potential emergencies. 

One such mitigation plan is preparing a crisis communications plan. 

A crisis communications plan provides a framework for timely and clear messaging from when the crisis hits through its evolution. A crisis communications plan often extends well beyond the end of the crisis to ensure that everything and everyone is on the same page or narrative. Like most proactive business management strategies, crisis communications plans fall into categories that mirror the most critical operations and functional areas.

Here are the top five crisis communications plans and what they aim to mitigate.

• Financial Crisis Communications Plan: This plan focuses on controlling the narrative surrounding revenue loss or asset devaluation caused by external factors (like decreased customer demand) or internal factors (like poor purchasing decisions).
• Personnel Crisis Communications Plan: This plan focuses on controlling the narrative surrounding either illegal or unethical behaviors of staff or stakeholders which could damage the organization’s reputation. 
• Organizational Crisis Communications Plan: This plan focuses on controlling the narrative surrounding negative press coverage or media attention when an organization mistreats or manipulates customers in pursuit of profits or market data.
• Technological Crisis Communications Plan: This plan focuses on controlling the narrative surrounding technology failures, such as a customer-facing website crashing or errors in codes that disable business processes and limit or shut down operations. 
• Environmental Crisis Communications Plan: This plan focuses on controlling the narrative surrounding operations disruptions ranging from one-time or temporary delays or closures (like a power outage or gas leak) to sustained, long-term delays or closures (like a plant shutdown or a devastating hurricane). 

Most Crisis Communications Plans have the same core phases and steps, including:

Pre-crises Phase 

Step 1: Identify Potential Crises Risk

Step 2: Designate and Educate Potential Crises Risk Owners and Spokespeople

Step 3: Standup Notifications and Monitoring Systems

Step 4: Test Response Regularly

Post-crises Phase

Step 5: Assess the Situation

Step 6: Create and Rollout Key Messaging

Step 7: Wind down/Wrap up Response as Quickly as Possible

Step 8: Perform Postmortem of Response Steps

Step 9: Revise Plans with Postmortem Insight

For more insight into Crisis Communications, check out these links:

Your Survival Guide to Crisis Communication – HubSpot

3 Best Practices For An Effective Response Plan – Business 2 Community

Crisis Management: Communications Best Practices – Department of Energy

If you need additional information or support creating crisis communications plans explicitly designed to fit your organization or business, contact us to learn more! We would love to help!

About the Author: Stephen Alfano is an Organizational Change Management Consultant and Communications Expert. He has over 30 years of experience in leading and managing initiatives for both private and public-sector clients. His résumé includes providing both new business and business process improvement services to Apple, American Express, AT&T, California Department of Transportation, Chevron, Entergy, Levi Strauss & Co., Louisiana Office of Tourism, Mattel, Microsoft, Novell, SONY, Sutter Health, and Wells Fargo. Stephen currently works as an Executive Consultant with KAI Partners, Inc., providing change management and communications expertise and project management support services on several active contracts.

By Chris Koroluk

For many of us, working from home has become the new normal. However, some people may find it difficult to recreate an office environment at home without a little technical guidance. Luckily, our IT team is here to help!

While laptops are portable and convenient, the screens are usually small. The small screen will often condense websites and make the text much harder to read. Reading small text for long periods of time can strain the eyes and cause headaches, thus slowing down your work.

Our IT tip: Use a spare TV in place of a computer monitor.

Since most laptops come with an HDMI port and using an HDMI cable, you can connect your laptop to a spare TV! You can use the TV in addition to your laptop screen or make the TV the primary display. Here’s how:

• Once you have your laptop and TV connected using the HDMI cable, press the Windows Key and the P on your keyboard. Then select ‘extend,’ or ‘second monitor only.’
• Adjust size scaling and resolution in the Display settings.

Next, you can change the power settings to keep your laptop on after the screen is closed, which allows you to use your laptop as a desktop PC. Here’s how:

• Go to Settings > System > Power & Sleep—the additional power settings are on the right.
• Click ‘Choose what closing the lid does.’
• Choose ‘Do Nothing’ on either or both ‘Battery’ and ‘Plugged in.’

This is just one way to make your office more functional so you can remain productive throughout the workday! Is there something our IT team can help you with? Let us know in the comments and we’ll talk about it in a future blog post!

By Nick Sherrell, PMP, MBA, CSM

January is the time of new. We have shaken off the retrospective December and are opening our eyes to new ideas and new possibilities for our careers, our personal lives, our habits, and perhaps even some new hobbies.

This January has a couple extra layers of ‘new.’ Not only is it a new year, but a new decade. On top of that, the term “2020” is a cliché connotation for someone having perfect vision.

Let’s talk about your organization’s vision.

Many clients I work with have a Strategic Plan. It is typically that document found somewhere deep inside their document library that pops up when you are using the search feature to find some other document. It is usually from a year or two ago, and sometimes still contains a ‘Draft’ watermark.

What happened?

All too often, it follows the same path that many of our personal new year’s resolutions take. A great exercise to think about our future with a lot of creative brainstorming, dreaming, and sometimes (let’s be honest here) wishful thinking. We write it all down, even set some abstract goals, and then…life hits! Critical staff get sick (or have kids that get sick). A new decision comes from the larger organization that shakes up your organizational structure. Sometimes those old habits are just too tempting to pass up, just like that dessert case at The Cheesecake Factory!

Here’s how to set up an organizational vision that sticks.

1. Commit to the process by building a team: It is hard enough to set your own personal vision into action. It is significantly harder to put somebody else’s imposed vision into action. Instead of doing this on your own or with a small group of executives, create a cross-functional team from all levels of your organization and have a trained facilitator guide these discussions. People brought into the design phase are given a sense of ownership and commitment to the results. This is not a strategy that is imposed on them, but rather something they have been empowered to help create. Equally as important, this commits you to the process because once you communicate the concept of building a vision to others, you create the accountability to see it through.
2. Set realistic and concrete goals with clear accountabilities: With your team, set 3-5 core focus areas that each have a maximum of three clearly defined and achievable indicators of success. Make these goals stretch goals, hard to achieve and only attainable through dedication and teamwork. They key factor to keep in mind when selecting core areas and key indicators is that less is more, especially in the early stages of creating a strategic culture. The simpler the message, the easier it is to get everyone on board and rowing at the same cadence.
3. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: Once you have identified the core focus areas and a few key indicators, spread this message like wildfire across your organization! Wherever possible in your communications to staff, tie the message back to your strategic goals.
4. Build and integrate frequent check-ins: This is where most strategic plans fall short and ultimately meet their demise by collecting virtual dust in a document library. Leaders are usually happy to get in a room and discuss strategy. They are usually pretty good at setting concrete goals, assigning accountability, and communicating a kick-off. The challenge is incorporating this into existing leadership meetings and decision-making. Inevitably, a distraction will happen. Prepare for it early by ingraining these goals into a habit. Which takes me to my last point…
5. Make vision an organizational habit: Once these efforts are integrated into your regular work, reward small wins to build momentum and turn strategic thinking into an organizational habit. If you don’t reach a goal, find the positive aspects and momentum and use those as a springboard to challenge the next iteration of goals. If positives are hard to find, then focus on the learning of what did not work and bring these lessons learned into your next strategic planning session.

Does this sound like a familiar scenario at your organization? If you need help putting your Strategic Plan into place—or creating one in the first place!—we would love to help! Contact us today to learn more!

About the Author: Nick Sherrell is a Project Manager with over 10 years of healthcare experience ranging from Quality, Performance Improvement, Technology Implementation, Data Analysis, and Consulting. Nick has worked with organizations ranging from the Sacramento Native American Health Center, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Blue Shield of California, and The Advisory Board Company. He currently works for KAI Partners, Inc as a Project Manager Consultant on Public contracts with the State of California, most notably with the Judicial Council of California and California Medicaid Management Information Systems. He received his MBA from UC Davis in 2015 with an emphasis in Organizational Behavior and Innovation. He became a Certified Scrum Master in 2018 through Scrum Alliance training offered at KAIP Academy. He lives in Sacramento with his wife, two children, and Golden Retriever Emma. Find Nick on LinkedIn here.

By Lucie-Anne Radimsky, CSPO

Last week, I attended the State of Technology – California Industry Forum, hosted by Techwire.

The event brought together technology and professional service delivery vendors who provide IT and support services to State agencies. According to event speaker Joe Morris, Vice President of Research at eRepublic, public sector technology spending in California looks like this:

• $7 billion State surplus
• $8 billion spent annually on IT
• $900 million in State contracts were awarded to 1,300 vendors through 7,000 purchase orders

Some of the event speakers included:

• Amy Tong, California Department of Technology (CDT) Director and Chief Information Officer
• Scott Howland, California Highway Patrol (CHP) Chief Information Officer & Chief, Information Management Division
• Michael Wilkening, Governor’s Office Special Advisor on Innovation and Digital Services
• Richard Rogers, CDT Chief Technology Officer and Acting Deputy Chief Information Officer
• Ben Word, CDT Chief Enterprise Architect, Government Operations
• Angela Shell, Deputy Director, Procurement Division, Department of General Services and Chief Procurement Officer

Topics discussed during the 4-hour event included the growing importance of AI, including the launch of a strategic initiative dedicated to this increasingly important technology. This strategic initiative will include Data Management; the development of an Information Security roadmap; a cloud first and cloud smart approach to be deployed on an as-needed basis, rather than a blanket solution; promoting a user-centric mentality when building government services; and using a modular and more agile approach to streamlining and improving project results.

I was particularly interested in the ‘Innovation in California’ panel which included Governor’s Office Advisor Michael Wilkening and CHP CIO Scott Howland. Chief Howland compared hamburgers to IT projects, likening the promise of innovative technology solutions to that of an advertisement for a juicy hamburger. The reality of what you receive often looks nothing like the photo—but, while it might be an imperfect version, it’s still a hamburger.

Chief Howland’s point was that the imperfect version was good enough to start with offered and a place from which to improve. This is the true path of innovation—to take risks, fail fast, and move on. He talked about the ‘mobile office’ patrol cars of the CHP workforce that will allow them to respond more quickly and more effectively, resulting in improved safety to citizens and communities.

Michael Wilkening from the Governor’s Office led his participation in the panel by announcing that there will be some key hires in the next few months. New hires include the naming of the Office of Digital Innovation (ODI) Director, as well as a Chief Data Officer—a true sign of the times!—who will likely lead the effort in promoting and implementing an overarching data use agreement that is currently being developed. (This data use agreement is inspired by an existing framework used within the Department of Health and Human Services).

Other ODI updates and projects in the pipeline include:

• Earmarking $10 million for innovation. The expectation is that this will help spark the growth of several smaller projects.
• Re-imagining the state’s website to improve and provide a more current experience in terms of how citizens interact with government. (See alpha.ca.gov to follow the progress of this undertaking.) Mr. Wilkening noted that a key to innovation is the importance of building greater trust in government among California’s citizens—increased trust means greater access to valuable data that will help define and inspire new services.

Department of General Services (DGS) staff closed out the conference with a panel discussion around procurement and the ways in which DGS is working to improve the process and experience. DGS discussed the arrival of RFI², a unique program which incorporates a proof of concept portion. The importance of accountability on both parties (vendor and agency) was another point driven home by Amy Tong, who stood in for Marlon Paulo, who was unable to attend. DGS also invited vendors to contact the agency with questions, concerns, and ideas on how to improve the procurement process.

Overall, this was a great event that allowed many of us public sector vendors to reconnect with our partners and colleagues within the community. It provided an arena for us to access leaders within the State who are instrumental in defining the upcoming IT projects that many of us vendors will help support.

About the Author: Lucie-Anne has over 15 years’ experience in communications and business development in the U.S. and Europe, on behalf of start-ups and non-profits. She has represented clients within the technology, energy, and telecommunications sectors to government agencies, press, and industry analysts throughout the world. Lucie-Anne has both American and E.U. citizenship. She is fluent in English and French. Lucie-Anne is an active community volunteer and has served on numerous non-profit boards and led alumni groups in Paris, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. She holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. She currently resides in Sacramento with her Brazilian husband and two boys.