In previous my previous posts I listed action items for ‘today’ and the lessons that people are likely to learn implementing them. Now it's time to talk about what paperwork and follow-up management tasks are needed to cope with the after-doing on Coronavirus (COVID-19) countermeasures. After you picked a project manager to coordinate enterprise IT responses, you need to:
1) Setup action items to follow-up contract language and audit-invoices
Great vendors are responsive and action-oriented to satisfy sudden needs (like those for remote work at home programs in response to Coronavirus). Verbal confirmations (and sometimes emails or text messages) need followup with real Purchase Orders and T&C’s. When the invoices come in audits need to be conducted to make sure that errors (from suppliers or customers) weren’t introduced during the eventual billing processes (particularly for telecommunications and license upgrades/seat counts for software).
Action Item: Get a manager started on doing this new extra project today.
Set up tracking to find out how much the response to Coronavirus is costing. Look at costs in a TCO fashion include a wide range of costs including such things as bandwidth added, incremental software licenses, extra cell phones and home-office bandwidth that will now be expensed as part of remote working. Get reports often starting with estimates today.
Action item: Meet with accounting/budget and select who will perform this work even if what ‘it is’ is being finalized.
2) Policy made formal
Enterprises are being caught-without fully defined ‘work at home/remote’ policies. There may be an unspoken policy, but it’s informal. Formal policy must be put in place. All folks will be somewhat unhappy because ‘no-policy’ is always more flexible (and misinterpreted) than any formal policy.
Hints to get done: Task a suitably senior person (preferably someone who has been working remote before and during this pandemic) to produce a ‘trial balloon’ policy and give folks a firm (and short) deadline to get the policy ratified thru the process (probably on an expedited basis). Another hint: make sure to get input and preferences from stakeholders from the beginning – human resources, supervisors, workers, management, and unions.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about how to procure the budget for these new and unexpected activities
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