What this means for your practice
Explain which work a failure affects and who should respond. Keep technical detail available for the supplier while giving staff an understandable next step.
An example to discuss with your team
Trigger a fictional connector failure and ask the owner what action they would take.
A practical conversation with your supplier
Trigger a sample connection failure. Can the owner identify the missing task, contact route and any agreed manual fallback? Include a backup owner. The first useful measure is how quickly someone recognises the business impact and takes responsibility, followed by the time needed to restore the workflow.
Plan the first improvement
Choose alert wording from the point of view of the person expected to respond. Name the business process, identify the affected work where appropriate and provide a clear route to support or the agreed fallback. Keep error codes available for the supplier, but do not make them the only explanation. Decide who owns the alert during normal work and who covers absence within the agreed support arrangement. A notification arriving somewhere is not the same as a person taking responsibility.
Rehearse acknowledgement and handover so the team knows whether another colleague is already dealing with the issue. Where an automation affects several services, explain which ones are known to be affected and which remain uncertain. Avoid making recipients investigate everything from scratch. Review alerts that repeatedly result in no action and adjust them with the supplier. This protects attention for genuine failures and helps the practice distinguish an emerging problem from the normal noise of a complicated system.
How to check the result
Measure time to identify the affected work and responsible owner.
Turn reading into a next step
Your action checklist
Work through these checks with your team or supplier. Tick the ones you have resolved and leave unknowns open.
Record what you know, what is still missing and the answer you need from your team or supplier.
Use project decisions only, without personal, patient or confidential details. Entries stay in this page and are not submitted to Kay & Co. Copy or download before leaving; this page does not save your notes.
Further reading
These sources provide background for the topic. The practice examples and checklist are illustrative planning suggestions from Kay & Co.
Related guides
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