In short, whilst these are deeply challenging times, not much has changed operationally for SocialOptic in the last few weeks. SocialOptic has been a ‘remote first’ company since it was founded, over 10 years ago. All of our team and associates are home-based and have location flexibility. While we have office facilities for meetings and recovery, they are not our centre of operations. All team members have individual ‘work continuity’ plans, and we already operate flexible hours and working styles to support staff who are supporting others. We use our own secure on-line planning tools to allow remote collaboration, and task handover.
One of our operational aims is “Lights out operation” – which means a focus on process automation and automated monitoring and recovery. While it is an aim, which means it is an on going effort, all essential operations are automated. We aim to continually minimise WIP (work-in-progress) and “document as you go” which help to minimise the impact of team availability.
In the past few weeks we have checked with and received updates from each of our suppliers on their own Business Continuity Plans, and also checked that our alternate suppliers remain viable recovery options. We continue to follow the IASME governance model, which we also use for broader risk management, and we have a daily management meeting to continue to monitor and access risks, and implement any additional mitigations that we can. All external meetings and training will happen online until further notice.
The well-being of our team and continuing to support our customers are our two primary concerns. We will continue to follow government advice and adapt to the evolving situation. We are adding extra resources to increase our capability and resilience, and minimising the amount of work-in-progress to protect capacity and delivery. Customers can continue to contact us via the support live chat, or their usual means, and we are here to help in whatever ways that we can.
We plan to remain agile, and to be as flexible as we can be in responding to our customers’ changing needs, putting our skills and technology to the best use that we can. Our thoughts are with everyone, particularly our NHS and health care customers. If you work with us, you know our values and our working style:- let us know what we can do to support you.