How to Solve an Urgent Issue

Every day software developers face different issues they need to solve for running the project. Some of those issues can be postponed, but some of them can be urgent. When the team finds a critical problem to solve, they often lose the consistency of actions, as they want to do everything as quickly as possible.

This article will focus on the algorithms in solving urgent issues, facilitate steps in searching for the best development and management decisions, and guide you through the primary and efficient techniques in looking for tactical solutions.

Guide in Solving Urgent Issues

One of the essential things is to detect the problem and outline the urgency. In most cases, people do not like urgent problems, as they make you put aside other issues and concentrate on searching for the solution. That is why you need to be sure that the issue is urgent and can block the whole software development process if not to solve it now.

In dealing with urgent issues, we delineate the crucial steps and approaches we will introduce next.

Analyze an Issue

First of all, you need to focus on problem analysis. You need to understand the nature of the problem, the time you need to spend on solving it, the tools you need to use, and the best results you want to get before starting the solving process. The analysis consist of few steps:

• Define the problem
• Understand the cause of the issue. The best way is to determine why the problem occurred, the contributing factors, and who knows about the issue.

Also, in this step, you need to define what makes this problem urgent and why it can not wait.

Use Brainstorm Solutions

After you analyze the problem, you need to brainstorm all possible solutions for the issue. This process of searching the answer can be divided on:

• writing all ideas in one document,
• looking at these ideas from different perspectives,
• analyzing possible deeper problems.
  

All the team can participate in brainstorming, as you need to collect as many possible variants of solving the issue as possible. You can have a separate document for the ideas or use a facilitation template for the brainstorming meeting. It is also essential to look at the problem from different angles, as it can help find the most efficient way of solving it.

Draw Up Strict Requirements

To find the solution you are looking for, you need to delineate its strict requirements. In the analytical stage, you will outline the results you need to achieve, and at the same time, it will help to understand the requirements for the solution. After the brainstorm, you will look at all possible solutions and find some that fit technical specifications. It is an integral part of understanding the issue, as the requirements will always depend on the nature of the problem.

Prioritize, Prioritize!

While you will focus on collecting the scope of ideas, you will need to define your priorities in solving the urgent issue. In some cases, you will sacrifice other tasks and projects, which means you will need to work with the preferences. To solve some problems, you will need to switch developers' tasks, which means that you must analyze the whole process, not only the issues you will solve.

Define Urgent and Important

The other point is to define which problems are urgent and which are essential. The issue is important if it affects the safety of people, can be a cause of losing money or breaking the law. It is also an essential issue if solving the problem will influence long-term processes. In case of a critical difficulty, you need to focus on it. Also, you can have urgent issues that require a fast and even short-term solution. If your problem has been recurring for a while, you had the same issue before, and it can stop the whole development process, you need to deal with it now.

Identify Solution Barriers

Not every solution will be easy to realize, as you can find barriers in this way. The best decision is to identify the type of barrier and stop ignoring it. You can evaluate constraints like a lack of time, money, or people to solve the problem. Also, it can be a political barrier or a lack of technological tools for the solution. Once you identify the type of constraint, you will be able to choose the best solution for addressing it.

Try to Avoid Urgent Issues in Favor of a Balanced and Trusting Team Mood

The best approach to solving urgent issues is to detect the problems quickly and not have pressing issues. At the same time, no one is protected from emergencies in the software development process. The advice for the startup leader is to trust the team and to respect the work balance. The team leader has a significant role in detecting such issues and building efficient communication in the company to ensure a productive process.

Final Thoughts

Solving immediate issues in the software development process can be a complicated task for the team. At the same time, some essential steps and approaches will help solve the urgent problem in a limited time. It is vital to pay attention to the analysis of the issue, brainstorming, and defining the roots of the problem. All those steps will help to focus on an efficient plan of solving the issue.

Moreover, you need to understand that all projects can have urgent issues, and the goal for the team leader is to find the most effective way of solving them. At the same time, the research shows that urgent work can damage the team, so it is crucial to detect the problems that need to be solved immediately but not overload the team with false urgent issues. It means that the main goal is to understand the problem, its cause, and its possible influence on the whole company, and only after that start planning the actions.