As soon as you can, you need to appoint one person to manage communications for the incident response.

One of the worst things you can do is to expect your incident manager to do all of their communicating. I’ve made that mistake.

I’ve also made the mistake of thinking I could handle all the communications. I’ve made that mistake, also.

Everyone will want to know what’s going on, will want to know when the system will be “up”.

Pick someone to be your single point of contact. You will be busy being the leader of your organization.

Your communication manager needs to have excellent listening skills, good judgment, and, especially, the ability to translate from “tech” to “business” and back again. Most of the people wanting to know status do not want jargon. They don’t really understand the technology and you don’t want them to.

Lots to know about listening. Active listening. Reflective listening. Empathic listening.

All three are important. In the case of a major system failure, you want your communication manager to be able to move from active to reflective and back as needed.

Your major stakeholders do understand business and business language. They need to be given status updates, when appropriate, in their own business language.

Your communication manager has three primary tasks:

• Hear and understand your incident manager
• Translate from tech to business and from business to tech
• Inform, in business terms, key stakeholders re status information

You could do this. You should not do this.

Get a dedicated ‘professional’.

You be the leader.