There’s a necessary risk that comes with doing business online. This is partly due to the freedom of the internet environment, but it’s also because of the dynamic nature of technology.
The internet experience is vibrant, engaging–and breakable. At some point during your website’s life, it’s going to experience a potentially serious issue. When that happens, the best thing you can do is have a prepared response.
How a Responsibility Matrix Will Help You Sleep at Night
In previous articles, we’ve discussed evaluating the seriousness of website issues, as well as identifying the reasons why your website may be inaccessible. We’ve emphasized the importance of having an emergency response plan in place ahead of time—building your website on secure code, updates, and patching, limiting access to admin areas, and also knowing exactly who to call when something breaks.
Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) represent the 4 different levels of involvement that different individuals will have on a single website issue. Also called a responsibility matrix, this graph can help you quickly track who’s responsible for assisting you when something goes wrong on your website.
In fact, it’s a good idea to create your matrix at the beginning of building your website when you’re initially coordinating with web developers, web designers, hosting providers, and any other third-party services.
Case Study: An Overloaded Server
This example is an amalgam of multiple client situations that we’ve encountered in the past because, unfortunately, this is quite common.
Say you launch a promotion over the holidays that drives an unexpectedly high volume of traffic to your website. Then, just a few hours into your promotion, you start fielding messages from customers who find themselves kicked out of your website, or unable to access your website at all. When you attempt to access your website yourself, you find yourself facing the same problem.
Immediately, you call the team that built your website to find out what the problem is. But it’s the weekend, and they're unable to get back to you right away. When you do get ahold of them, they tell you that the problem is an overloaded server, and they’re not the right people you should be talking to.
“Didn’t you build my website?” you ask.
“Yes, we wrote code for the front-end experience. But the issue is unfortunately with the server,” you might hear in response. And then they give you the number you should call to connect with the folks in charge of your server to help resolve the issue.
Server issues are common enough that service providers are accessible at all hours, and they address your problem immediately.
But what this means is that by initially trying to get in contact with the wrong provider, you’ve lost valuable trafficking time—maybe a few hours—when your issue could have been addressed within a few minutes if you’d known the right team to call initially.
A responsibility matrix is essentially scenario planning. Creating a responsibility matrix upfront addresses one of the biggest issues commonly faced between businesses and web service providers: communication. The intention of the matrix is to come to a common understanding of who is responsible for what.
Why A Responsibility Matrix Is Important
The benefit of a responsibility matrix can be summed up in two ways:
- It helps you keep track of the tech supporting your website
- It helps you keep track of what service provider is responsible for each tech
Your website actually rests on a stack of technology—your platform and server—and different parties are responsible for maintaining different technologies in your website’s stack. In the scenario above, users were unable to connect to the website because of an issue with the server, which the hosting provider was responsible for and could quickly fix.
The Matrix of Responsibility in Action
In addition to dealing with technical emergencies, here are other website support experiences where a matrix will help.
1. Who’s Updating My Website?
Keeping your website up-to-date is vital for maintaining security, as well as the integrity of your user experience. Out-of-date technology can mean questionable code integrity and a vulnerable website. Having a matrix of responsibilities can help you keep track of who you need to contact when the software in your website’s tech stack needs to be appraised and updated.
2. The Hardware Side of Things
In addition to maintaining your website’s software, a matrix of responsibility can help you keep track of your website’s physical dependencies as well.
3. Who is Monitoring my Website?
Rather than hearing about site issues from customers, there are excellent monitoring tools that let you see and forecast issues. The best way to set those up is to have responsible parties monitoring the systems they can respond to. For example, having alarms set for various CPU levels or hard disk levels, lets your hosting company proactively address server issues.
4. Where’s the Problem?
Part of not knowing who to contact comes from not knowing exactly where your website is failing. Establishing a matrix of responsibility ahead of time, when your website is being built, will help you keep track of the stack that your website is dependent on. You can also establish a “call-down” so there are point people who can triage the problem and route it correctly. Knowing what each individual tech is responsible for will help you identify the problem, and contact the responsible party much faster.
When dealing with technical emergencies, a single hour can make a significant difference. And while you’ve done everything you can to prepare your website so that you don’t have to face the scramble of addressing an emergency, having a plan in place when one eventually arises will give you greater control over unexpected situations.