Prioritize an office outage and an urgent executive request with one technician available

Example Answer

Fictional scenario response: This original example illustrates a decision in the supplied case; it is not a claim of actual employment experience.

I would declare the order-entry outage P1 and handle the director’s laptop as P3 while its approved spare remains usable. I have one pair of hands until 09:15, so I would spend those minutes mobilizing the shared-service response, confirming its scope, and giving the director a practical route to the meeting.

I would open the incident, page the application and network on-call owners, and capture the start time, affected locations, a representative error, and whether other services work. I would ask an office contact to confirm one affected user’s experience while avoiding a flood of duplicate troubleshooting. I would keep a single incident record and link incoming reports so the next technician can see the current situation.

I would ask the director or their assistant to try the approved spare and cached slides, using a short instruction I can verify by phone. My message would be: “Order submission is down for eighty colleagues and its incident response is active. Please use the prepared spare for the presentation; I will confirm that it displays the slides. A colleague arrives at 09:15 and can take the original laptop.” If the spare fails, I would reassess its priority instead of pretending the workaround exists.

By 09:10 I would publish: “Order submission is unavailable for the affected office; the application and network owners are investigating. No recovery time is confirmed. Next update: 09:25.” At 09:15 I would assign the arriving colleague a specific task based on the latest evidence, with acknowledgment. I would keep coordination and business communication, and the technical owner would control infrastructure changes. Before announcing recovery, I would require a representative order to complete and confirm that the affected workflow is usable.

What the interviewer is assessing

Essential: Apply the supplied impact-and-workaround policy, mobilize technical owners, provide one incident record, and make realistic use of the spare and second technician.

Stronger: Specify delegation, confirmation of the workaround, update times, and business-level recovery checks. Reprioritize when impact changes.

Red flags: Giving the executive automatic precedence, ignoring the executive entirely, making unsupported recovery promises, or changing network equipment without authority.

Pressure test

At 09:05, evidence shows only ten staff have the order issue and an approved web fallback works. The director now has an unrelated payroll-approval deadline at 09:15, and neither laptop can open it. How do you adapt?

Example response: “I would tell the incident owners that the order workflow now has a verified fallback and no longer meets this policy’s P1 definition. I would have the office contact distribute the fallback and ask the incident manager to record the revised classification. The payroll task meets P2: a time-critical individual workflow with no workaround. I would take its immediate triage, confirm the application and error, and involve the payroll application owner, while leaving the shared-service investigation with its named owner. I would ask the payroll business owner whether an already authorized alternate approver can complete the run; I would not share credentials or grant approval rights myself. At 09:10 I would report whether that alternative is confirmed and the risk to 09:15. If the web fallback fails or customer impact grows again, I would reassess both demands with the duty manager instead of keeping the old queue order.”

Follow-up

How would you stop eighty separate reports from creating conflicting work?

Example response: “I would link reports to the shared incident, keep one current scope and action log, and give technicians a brief intake message. A named owner would coordinate each investigation. New symptoms would still be assessed, because a shared outage does not prove every report has the same cause.”

Source context: Atlassian describes incident coordination, escalation, delegation, and communication. Atlassian incident-response handbook. The case facts, thresholds, roles, and proposed decisions are fictional exercise inputs, not universal policy.