A continuity tool built the week a hurricane hit

The knot

Around 33% of the team lived in one country. A hurricane hit it. Overnight, a third of the scheduled hours were at risk, and the questions were the usual ones, just all at once: which shifts are affected, how much of the schedule is exposed, which tasks have nobody else trained on them, and who in the rest of the world could cover.

With a team in 75+ countries, some version of this happens constantly on a smaller scale: a power cut, a strike, a national holiday nobody on the US side had on their calendar. Until this tool existed, somebody worked it out by hand, under time pressure, every time.

What I did

• Built a country risk assessment tool that takes a date range and one or more affected countries and models them against the live schedule.
• It reports shift exposure, people affected, hours at risk, and the number of “sole-coverage” hours, meaning hours where every scheduled person is in an affected country and there’s no backup at all.
• A day-by-day timeline and a day-by-hour heatmap show where the exposure concentrates.
• A task ranking shows which kinds of work are most exposed, sorted worst first.
• A forward-looking shift list flags what needs triage in the next 24 hours versus what can wait.
• A backup pool lists, per at-risk task, the people outside the affected countries who are trained on it, split into those already active on the project and those who have it in their roster.
• Kept it simple enough that other accounts could adopt it without me maintaining it for them. There’s a spreadsheet version too.

What changed

We recovered all billable hours and had zero service interruption with a third of the team affected. The tool was adopted company-wide.

What I’d tell someone doing the same

I built mine under pressure. Build yours during a quiet week. The day a region goes down is a bad day to start counting who is trained on what.