Strategies for activating events
When you activate events, you define the essential ingredients of your quality information system. You must ensure that the events generated are relevant. Ask yourself these questions before you activate an event.
Does this event affect the quality of our service or product?
Determine if the event you want to activate affects on quality, both internally and externally. If the event does not affect quality, notifying people that the event occurred could be a waste of time.
What information about the event is important?
The information you gather about an event that has occurred is important. You do not want to overwhelm people with too much information. Conversely, the information you gather should be relevant and adequate enough to tell the recipient of the notification the nature of the event and its magnitude. Consider using the additional filtering fields when you activate an event.
Who should be notified when the event occurs?
You must know who is to be notified when an event has occurred. Consider the recipient of the event notification carefully. If you notify the incorrect person, inappropriate action may be taken, or no action may be taken. If you notify too many people, there could be too many people trying to act on a single event. Additionally, if people receive too many event notifications, they may eventually ignore them. If the problem is not resolved when an event occurs, the quality information system has failed.
How should the operator be notified that the event has occurred?
Although email is a convenient method of communicating, it may not always be the best method. People who are inundated with email messages on a daily basis may not have the opportunity to filter through them in a timely manner, which could cause event actions to go unnoticed. Consider each individual recipient of an event action when deciding which method of notification is best for that event and operator.