Improve Situation Awareness

You need to have a clear idea of what the situation is, in order to effectively respond to an incident. Cobalt lets you dig a little deeper to gather details before, during, and after the incident.

What are your employees seeing?

– Before the incident

As soon as an alert is triggered, Cobalt provides many useful information about the incident, such as the location of the event and pieces of information about the alert launcher. With the customized questionnaires, you can ask specific questions to the alert launcher at the alert launch, to better understand the situation.

The challenge here is to find the perfect balance between getting as many details as possible and saving time by cutting down questions. You need to understand the situation from the beginning, to avoid going back and forth. Think about all the details you’d like to receive if one of your employees was triggering an alert.

One good practice is to imagine the issue from the standpoint of the alert launcher. Think about the type of person (title, role, etc.) that could be confronted with this issue. Then, think about the context in which this person would interact with Cobalt: Where is that person? Is he/she on the move? Does he/she have time to respond to questions? You might want to open your Cobalt app and visualize the length of your questionnaire. It will help you find the ideal degree of response.

What are your employees doing?

– During the incident

Either it’s because you’re on a business trip, or simply out of the office, there are times when you’ll be out of the incident environment. But you’ll want to know what happens as the incident unfolds. 

Cobalt lets you follow the progression of the events with different displays. You might want to use the execution flow to see the progress of each task assigned to each employee. Or, you might want to read the event timeline to see how the actions impacted the process.