We’re all familiar with the risk-averse adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and in engineering, it IS often wise to avoid tinkering with things when there is no good reason to risk the unexpected. Unfortunately, this is a stifling environment for creative professionals that misses out on genuine opportunities to improve service levels. I’ve found it handy to have a few things “ready to go” in a crisis…actions that fall into two categories:

First, there are the “we’ll do that the next time we have to reboot the server,” tasks. It’s helpful to have a set of tasks like this around for when there is downtime–while you are waiting for the phone call from vendor support or while the entire office is offline due to something beyond your control such as a localized communications outage. “Since no one can access the internet for the next couple hours…we will be performing some systems maintenance tasks…” These kinds of tasks should be well-contained and unrelated to the crisis at hand–i.e. don’t start things you can’t finish.