Check your team can communicate during an outage

What this means for your practice

Prepare approved alternative communication routes and verify that participants can locate them during an outage. Keep contact information current through the organisation's controlled process.

How to review the arrangement

Run a fictional exercise without the primary channel. How do people establish who is coordinating and when updates will arrive? Keep contacts maintained through the organisation's process. The practical measure is whether the team can organise useful action, not whether an alternative app is merely listed in a document.

Check how coordination starts when the usual channel is unavailable

Identify the communication tools assumed by the recovery instructions and ask whether they depend on the service being lost. Agree an approved alternative and make current contact instructions accessible to authorised participants. Keep the responsible roles clear, including who coordinates decisions and who updates affected staff. An alternative platform named in a document is not enough if nobody knows how the group will begin using it.

Run a fictional discussion exercise without the primary channel. Ask participants how they establish contact, confirm the coordinator and find the next update. Record any reliance on inaccessible accounts or outdated contact details. Resolve those gaps through the organisation's controlled process and repeat the relevant coordination step. The measure should reflect useful communication being established, not merely one message being delivered. Clear coordination lets technical recovery proceed with shared priorities and reduces the confusion of several people issuing different instructions through improvised routes.

How to check the result

Track time to establish an effective approved communication route.