| In a previous job, I had a critical incident crop up and we were dealing with the offshore parent company. All the senior management had been cc’ed into the emails about the problem. Result: nobody was willing to say anything for fear of looking bad in front of those people. This was frustrating to say the least. I solved this by replying all, but I took out all the senior people. I said something along the lines “hey guys, I’m the guy who needs this fixed. I can see you are la working hard. I’m removing a number of people from the cc lost and we will communicate with them in a seperate email. Just keep me up to date with how it’s going and tell me what you need from my end.” This worked wonders. They worked the issue, and though it took some time it was to be expected. When it was solved, I found the original email, replied all (including management) and explained that the problem was solved, and made a point of highlighting the excellent work the team fixing the problem had done on resolving the issue. I never had any issues with the patent company’s dev team after that :-) in fact, they went through our incident reports and fixed 80% of the longstanding issues within the next week! Which I wasn’t expecting… Moral of the story - take as much pressure off the incident team as you can. |