Incident Prevention Versus Incident Fix

Preventing incidents is better than fixing them, but proactive operation is harder than it sounds for reasons that have little to do with competence. In The Journey to Service Excellence, John Sansbury identifies four barriers that keep capable teams firefighting and sets out practical ways to make the shift.

• The four barriers. People are too busy firefighting to work on improvements; management and consumers set unreasonable deadlines; the cost of prevention is easy to see while the cost of failure is not; and a hero culture rewards those who fix things rather than those who prevent failures.
• The stakes are high. Sansbury notes that putting right things that should not have gone wrong can cost as much as 30 per cent of an enterprise's turnover, rising to 85% in IT, against typical profit margins of 5 to 10 per cent.
• Free up time and push back. Use temporary contract resource to cover business as usual, let staff book protected improvement time, and respond to extra urgent work by asking what should be reassigned or deferred.
• Make prevention visible. Calculate the cost of major incidents to justify problem management, document value in a service catalogue and service level agreements, and focus on proactive processes such as problem, capacity, availability, event and service component management. One company even ran a 'pre post major incident review' for an attack that had not yet happened.