C.L.E.A.N. up after an Outage

Anyone who works in business knows that systems outages happen. But if you're responsible for correcting such outages, here's a handy little acronym to help C.L.E.A.N. up afterwards:

• C as in “Cop to it” - Admit you made a mistake (even if it was only a mistake in judgment). Take full responsibility for the impact of your actions (or those of your staff or vendor personnel).
• L as in “Listen for the deeper issue” - Sure, an outage is annoying, but is it just that? Maybe your customer was particularly annoyed because s/he wasn't notified as to the potential of an outage? How do you communicate with your stakeholders when there isn't an outage (yet) might be a good place to look.
• E as in "Echo your Apology or Regret" - Don't fall into the trap of thinking that apologizing just once makes everything okay. Remember, you probably really messed up someones Monday morning, or Friday afternoon. When Henry Kissinger said, "Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full," he wasn't just speaking for himself.
• A as in “Accept Accountability” - Taking responsibility is only part of it; accepting accountability is the rest. So welcome to the doghouse. You did the crime, now do the time! But, if you work hard, keep your nose clean, and do some of your best work in the weeks that follow, your canine-like residency will likely be short-lived and soon forgotten.
• N as in “Never let it happen again!” - Puleeze, don’t make the same mistake twice. Find out what happened (think: Root Cause Analysis) and put whatever processes you need in place to insure that this hole is sufficiently patched, once and for all.

From my experience in managing the mission critical telecommunications systems at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (what I did before becoming a coach) every minute of down-time needs about an hour of post-outage clean-up.

If you're doing it in less , you're likely missing some essential C.L.E.A.N. steps along the way.