When unplanned work takes on a whole new meaning: Fighting IT fires in the time of Covid-19

Some sectors are experiencing 11 times the number of incidents they were before the pandemic

Even before Covid-19, unplanned IT work was an unwelcome fact of life in the enterprise that undermined employee morale and risked increased turnover. Covid-19 threatens to make that worse.

Unplanned work comes in many forms: responding to a data breach, applying emergency patches, repairing a data centre outage. Such events can damage your organisation so there's little choice but for the IT department to put work schedules and personal lives on hold and swing into action.

Reading the news you'd think outages, crashes and breaches are on the rise - and you'd be right. A PagerDuty report Unplanned Work: The Human Impact of an Always-On World that surveyed 1,316 staff responsible for tech planning and problem resolution, found 65 per cent encountered a "major technology issue" each month - and 44 per cent each week.

Digitalisation has placed the burden for keeping business running on the shoulders of IT, therefore putting IT staff on the frontline. Covid-19 brings a fresh round of crisis management to the mix, as employers embrace more technology in an attempt to maintain business as usual.

Work from home - if you can

Covid-19 has seen employers dramatically expand use of services such as Office 365, Google Docs, Zoom and Box as they keep workers at home - and IT's been left to fight the fires. Rollout has overwhelmed corporate virtual private networks and network appliances with remote connections. Microsoft's Office 365 senior program manager, Paul Collinge, explains the fallout here.

Data from our own systems shows some sectors are currently experiencing 11 times the number of incidents they were before the latest Covid-19 measures came into place. New systems are also storing up future problems: it's challenging to spec-out such complex architectures and implement requirements in ordinary circumstances - never mind now. And if you haven't piloted the system or trained users, you can expect bugs and an increase in support calls. The new estate revives all the old concerns over cybersecurity, too.

Worry about the workers

Covid-19 comes at a difficult time for IT. Unplanned Work: The Human Impact of an Always-On World, c ommissioned before the pandemic, explored the human consequences of organisations' growing dependence on technology. It found sudden and unexpected workloads prompted by technology emergencies meant 53 per cent of IT staff suffered from increased stress and anxiety, 49 per cent saw their work-life balance adversely affected, and 59 per cent saw their personal lives suffer.

Employers should worry. Staffers are falling back on their weapon of last resort - nearly one in three had considered quitting while a quarter advised potential new recruits against joining. The temptation to leave affected 33 percent of managers, a quarter of front-line staff and 28 percent of executives. That's skilled people with knowledge and experience of your systems who are prepared to walk.

It's vital you restore morale - but how? You can't eliminate unplanned incidents or remove the unexpected, but you can reduce their frequency and lighten the load of recovery.

This means replacing manual tools for automated processes and building a recovery plan. That might seem like a distraction right now but they will have immediate and long-term benefits. PagerDuty found a strong correlation between the existence of established automated, documented, repeatable plans and a reduction in unplanned work. Eighty nine per cent of organisations who claimed to be 'mostly automated' had also developed a documented response plan to tackle major technology emergencies. Unplanned work had fallen by 16 percent.

The basis of a planned response is understanding your infrastructure and having systems and procedures that let you act before things spin out of control. That means gathering and analysing machine and human data to spot incidents. That data and insight will let you notify the 'right' people and serve as the basis of long-term planning for further improvement.

Such measures will relieve staff of the arduous duties of recovery - with positive results: PagerDuty found a reduction in stress levels of 15 per cent and an overall improvement in work-life balance.

Technology emergencies were sapping the morale of IT staff but the response to Covid-19 has introduced a new element to the tinder-dry mix of staff discontent. As we begin a new wave of technology rollout, we have an opportunity to break the cycle of fire fighting - for everyone's sake.

Steve Barrett is vice president EMEA at PagerDuty