3 Digital Challenges in Times of Crisis & How to Overcome Them

Do you remember building those spaghetti (or popsicle stick) bridges in grade school to see how much weight they could hold?  Inevitably, with enough weight, they were stressed enough to break.  In times of crisis, digital teams must reinforce their metaphorical “bridges”.

We’re living in a time of high stress – and that’s not just as it pertains to our everyday lives and those of our employees, but also our businesses.  And – like the spaghetti bridge – during times of stress, stuff starts to break. That can apply to digital marketing plans, technical infrastructure, and staffing, to name a few.  When operations are status quo, you simply may not recognize the gaps lying deep within your organization’s web infrastructure or websites.  However, during a time of crisis, catastrophe or unexpectedness – these holes can be exposed.  

In this blog, we’ll examine 3 challenges that our clients are facing in eye of the pandemic – how we’re partnering to quickly resolve them, and tips for your digital marketing and technology teams to “reinforce the bridge” before the next stressor comes along.

Three Challenges (and Solutions) During Times of Crisis

Challenge #1: Resourcing to Adequately Meet Key Project Deadlines

During times like these, it’s often an “all hands on-deck” approach.  That means employees may be reallocated to assist crisis support teams.  This can leave a resource gap that needs to be filled – whether those are marketing strategy folks, web designers and technical developers, or application support team members.  Separate from reallocation concerns, several Paragon clients working in a blended on/offshore development paradigm have indicated that their offshore development teams are experiencing disruption due to stay-at-home measures overseas.  Having a contingency plan to back-fill those resources is critical, particularly for “in-flight” projects.

Staff augmentation can play an important role to help fill critical knowledge gaps in organizations as they scale down or scale up their teams – whether that’s retainer-based, project-based or fixed-time arrangements. Teams that already have managed services in play benefit from having some elasticity and “insurance” built in – with immediate access to skilled workers with an array of strategic and technical knowledge.  Over the last few weeks, Paragon’s managed services clients have leaned on our teams as reliable “step ins” – whether for regular staff that have been asked to take part in crisis communication, as resources for “in-flight” projects, or to fill in for employees who are quarantined due to COVID-19.

How to Solve it: Staff Augmentation Resources

Staff augmentation can play an important role to help fill critical knowledge gaps in organizations as they scale down or scale up their teams – whether that’s retainer-based, project-based or fixed-time arrangements. Teams that already have managed services in play benefit from having some elasticity and “insurance” built in – with immediate access to skilled workers with an array of strategic and technical knowledge.  Over the last few weeks, Paragon’s managed services clients have leaned on our teams as reliable “step ins” – whether for regular staff that have been asked to take part in crisis communication, as resources for “in-flight” projects, or to fill in for employees who are quarantined due to COVID-19.

Challenge #2: Standing Up a Crisis Communication Web Page or Microsite

Quickly get up-to-speed on project scope and schedule – including goals, requirements, timelines and “in-flight” status. Ask the CMO of any major organization today, particularly those in healthcare, and it’s likely they’ll tell you one of their top visited web pages is their COVID-19 informational page.  The need to inform customers or community members (whether you’re a healthcare organization, bank or financial services, or restaurant) will continue until we’re back to status quo.  Yes, there are a lot of closures now; but, there will be a lot of re-openings later.  Your COVID-19 microsite or webpage needs to be set up in a way that makes information clear and concise –while providing customers with an empathetic customer experience.  

How to Solve it: User Experience Design

Amidst the chaos, it’s important to stay calm, not overthink your approach, and adhere to the basics of human-centered design.  That’s what we’re doing for our clients.  If you’re building a webpage or microsite to serve the public – make sure it’s set up to serve the public.  If you build it right the first time, you’ll have a template in place in the event of future crisis scenarios.  Here’s are 6 tips to consider when standing up this informational page:  

1. Identify consumer intents: Get to know your audience and how they’re different, what they’re looking for in an exact moment, and why they’re visiting your site.  You can quickly extract this data from readily available sources: web analytics, web inquiry, and/or customer service phone calls.

1. Create an information hierarchy: Ensure that the site architecture has a hierarchy of content that’s easy to navigate – giving priority “real estate” to the most important communications.
2. Deliver clear & concise content:  Make information easy to find, easy to read, and easier to understand.  
3. Timestamp the latest updates:  Things will change, and often.  Make sure repeat visitors can clearly tell what’s been updated since their last visit (hours, closings, etc.) –  which is especially true for COVID-19 informational pages.  
4. Accessibility matters:  Ensure that accessibility standards are met and users of all ages and abilities have an efficient user experience.  
5. Open channels for engagement:  People will have questions.  Provide a way to ask them – whether that’s through email, social or other means.  Social channels can serve as a powerful channel for real-time, two-way communications.

Challenge #3: Ensuring Your Site Can Scale to Accommodate Traffic Surges

Is your enterprise prepared for traffic that is an order of magnitude higher than normal?  One of our healthcare clients who averaged around 7k total requests/minute recently ran a prime-time segment on a major TV network introducing pertinent information to the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediately following the segment, requests jumped to 45k/minute!  These abnormal spikes in traffic can literally bring down websites if you’re not well-positioned to handle them.  This type of infrastructure preparation also applies to other, non-crisis situations with high-volume upticks – like Black Friday, for example.

When augmenting staff during in-flight projects or otherwise, it should always amount to far greater than “just adding staff”.  True augmentation means inserting talented resources that will know how to integrate into an existing team and enhance the performance of everyone around them through subject matter expertise, while fulfilling their assigned tasks in an exemplary fashion.

How to Solve it: Web Development (Auto–scaling & other lightweight solutions)

A well architected website can be responsive to upticks in traffic as there are platforms with license schemes such as Auto-scaling Platform as a Services (PAAS) – which when high-volume traffic is recognized, creates more servers on its own and quickly scales up or down accordingly.  However, taking a major enterprise site into auto-scaling is a heavy lift.  In times of crisis response, there are lighter weight solutions that can be implemented if you haven’t made those plans early in the site build.

1. Adjust your auto-scale minimums:  When you know you are going to have a big push in traffic, increasing your minimum capacity units (throughput) accordingly will have a positive effect on performance.  Set your minimum to right around where you’re averaging so that you’re always covered.  Keep the maximum at the highest point as you don’t get charged unless you reach that number.
2. Lean on someone with more bandwidth like a Content Deliver Network (CDN) provider: Consider moving all assets (images, scripting code, etc.) to a dedicated server.  Utilizing companies that do CDN hosting can allow you to allocate more resources to their servers so that your website can perform best on higher volumes of traffic.  
3. Consider a modern, lightweight headless architecture: A headless architecture loads assets of a webpage separately.  Traditionally, a request is made – then the page is built and sent back to the user.  “Headless” is about sending priority pieces back to the user in batches to make the performance quicker.  NOTE: This is typically a decision that needs to be made at the beginning of a project.  However, during a crisis – consider a headless architecture for any new microsites being built.  

While these are just a few challenges clients are facing today (and solutions we’ve implemented) in response to the pandemic, it’s prudent to take a critical, retroactive look at your own digital crisis response measures.  But before anything else, preparation is the key to success.  Having a strong governance in place ahead of these situations can save a lot of headaches, time, and money in the long run.