Most incident plans are written around buildings. A consulting firm’s people are usually somewhere else: at client head offices, in hotels and airports, or working from home in another country. When something goes wrong, the firm has to find out who is affected before it can do anything useful.
Consider a London-based management consultancy of around 1,500 people with a large client engagement in a city three hours ahead. At 07:30 local time, a gas leak closes the streets around the client’s head office, the police set up a cordon and the client evacuates its building. It is 04:30 in London.
Eleven consultants are on the engagement. Six are at the client’s assembly point after an early workshop, three are in a hotel inside the cordon and one is on a flight that lands in two hours. The last is working from home abroad and has no idea anything has happened.
The questions arrive faster than the answers. Which consultants are inside the cordon? Has anyone told the three in the hotel what the police are telling guests? Who owns this at the firm: the engagement partner, the firm’s office in that city or the security team in London?
This is where incident coordination for consulting teams earns its place. The firm needs instructions that fit where each person is, and one owner for the response while the partner, the client and the security team each hold part of the picture.
For a firm whose people are rarely in one place, knowing who is where is the first control in any incident. Every later decision depends on it.
What Is Incident Coordination For Consulting Teams?
Incident coordination for consulting teams is the work of reaching consultants wherever they are, naming who owns the response and confirming that every person is accounted for and every action is done. It covers people on client premises, in transit and working remotely, as well as those in the firm’s own offices.
Communication therefore follows where people are on the day. Responsibility is named before the incident, because in a consulting firm nobody inherits it by default.
Why Consulting Firms Struggle To Say Who Is Where
Consulting firms struggle to say who is where because the answer is spread across systems built for other jobs. Staffing tools record engagements, travel bookings record flights and hotels, and calendars record workshops. None of them can say who was inside a police cordon at 07:30, the first thing an incident owner needs to know.
The staffing plan says eleven consultants are on site. It doesn’t say that one is working from home abroad until Thursday. So the first person awake builds a list by hand, and it goes out of date as soon as someone moves. A firm that already knows which groups it needs, and who keeps them current, starts with an answer instead of a spreadsheet.
Consultant Safety At Client Sites Is A Shared Responsibility
Consultant safety at client sites is shared between two organisations. The client runs the site, its alarms and its evacuation. The consulting firm stays responsible for its own people, including knowing where they are. Each side can only do its part if it knows what the other is doing.
In Great Britain, regulation 12 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a host employer to give the employer of visiting workers comprehensible information about the risks on its premises and the measures taken. The host must also take all reasonable steps so visiting workers can identify who runs its evacuation procedures.
The Health and Safety Executive makes the same point from the other side. Its guidance on managing the risks of working alone says that when a lone worker will be at someone else’s workplace, the employer must ask that employer about any risks and control measures.
Outside Great Britain the legal detail differs, but the operating reality is the same. The six at the assembly point will follow the client’s marshals, and they should. The firm’s job is to know they are there and confirm each is safe.
Build Groups Around Engagements And Locations
Notification groups usually mirror the HR system, so they sort people by office, department and grade. During an incident at a client site, the useful groups are different: everyone on a given engagement, everyone at a given client location today and everyone travelling into or out of an affected city.
Those groups change every week, so each needs an owner. The team that updates engagement staffing can own engagement groups, and travel groups can follow the bookings.
Location matters as much as membership, because one message to all eleven would be wrong for most of them. Each location needs its own instruction:
- the six at the assembly point follow the client’s marshals
- the three in the hotel follow the police and hotel staff
- the consultant on the flight finds a message waiting when the phone comes back on
For the hotel, the message might read: “Gas leak near the client’s head office. Police have closed the surrounding streets. Follow instructions from the police and hotel staff, and do not travel to the client’s office this morning. Reply to confirm you are safe. Next update by 08:15 local time.”
Time Zones Decide Who Is Awake To Act
Time zones decide who is awake to act. At 04:30 London time, the security director is asleep and the engagement partner is heading to bed in North America. The person best placed to help runs the firm’s office in the city and is awake, but isn’t on the engagement.
A workable escalation path doesn’t need a large team. It needs four things agreed in advance:
- a named first responder for each region, with a deputy
- a time limit before an unanswered alert moves to the next person
- authority for the regional responder to act without waking London first
- a route to the global lead that works at night
Who Owns The Incident When The Client Is Also Responding?
The incident should be owned by one named person from the firm’s own incident structure, such as the security or business continuity duty lead, with the engagement partner as the liaison with the client. Splitting the roles stops one partner running both the relationship and the response late at night.
Without that rule, three people act at once or nobody does. Writing the split down settles it before the day:
Who | What they own during the incident |
The client’s incident team | The site: alarms, evacuation and building access |
The firm’s incident owner | Accounting for every consultant, and decisions on travel and work |
The engagement partner | The client relationship and what the firm tells the client |
The local office lead | Practical help on the ground, from transport to a place to work |
Share the split with the client when the engagement starts. A client incident manager who knows exactly who to call will make one call instead of three.
Silence From A Travelling Consultant Needs An Owner
Silence from a travelling consultant needs an owner because silence has several possible meanings, and only one of them is an emergency. A phone in flight mode, a consultant asleep in another time zone and a flat battery look the same on a response list. Someone has to work through each gap until it is explained.
The consultant on the flight can’t reply, and the one working abroad isn’t affected and hasn’t seen the message. The firm should record the difference between not affected and not heard from, because the client will ask about both.
Two partners are also due to fly in on Thursday. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office publishes foreign travel advice on safety and security for each country, with email updates when it changes. Whoever decides on that trip should be reading it.
Challenging The Assumption That Consultants Can Look After Themselves
Consultants are experienced travellers who are used to solving problems on their own, so it is tempting to assume they will look after themselves in an incident. For a delayed train, they will. For anything larger, the assumption breaks down on the day.
Information is the first problem. The consultants in the hotel don’t know the client is closing for the day, and the one on the flight doesn’t know about the leak at all. Proof is the second. A firm that relied on people calling in can’t show anyone that everyone was accounted for.
There is a duty question too. The Health and Safety Executive describes lone workers as people working without close or direct supervision, and its leaflet on protecting lone workers expects employers to have systems to keep in touch with them and respond to any incident. A consultant travelling alone can fit that description.
A Practical Test For Incident Coordination Across Consulting Teams
Try this against an ordinary day last month. Could the firm have listed every consultant in one city within fifteen minutes? Is there a named owner for each region at 04:30 London time? Does every engagement partner know whether they own the incident or the client relationship? Could the firm show a client when each consultant confirmed they were safe?
Two or more honest noes point to a coordination gap rather than a messaging one. The article on why IT alerting alone is not enough draws the same line for technology incidents.
How Crises Control Supports Incident Coordination For Consulting Teams
Crises Control is an Operational Incident Coordination Platform that connects an organisation’s existing systems rather than replacing them. The gap it addresses is the one the scenario exposes: communication tools send notifications, but they don’t coordinate the updates, acknowledgements or response activities that follow.
The module most relevant here is Incident Manager, Crises Control’s incident management software. Authorised users can launch predefined response plans and use message templates and recipient groups from one structured workspace, with plans, procedures, maps and contact lists attached, so an engagement or travel group is ready before anyone needs it.
During the incident, acknowledgement tracking shows who has responded and who needs chasing. The incident timeline keeps a chronological record of communications, updates and decisions, so the firm can answer the client the next morning with times rather than recollections.
The employee safety software page covers the SOS button in the mobile app, which works wherever there is a mobile signal and shares GPS location only where location sharing is enabled. For a professional services parallel, the page on incident management software for legal services covers coordination across offices, practice areas and time zones.
The software does not decide whether a consultant should stay at the assembly point or go back to the hotel. That remains a judgement for the incident owner, informed by the client and the local authorities. Its role is to get the decision to the right people and show who has acknowledged it.
Accounting For Every Consultant Is Where Coordination Begins
Accounting for every consultant is where coordination begins. Once the firm knows exactly who is where, it can decide who owns the response, what each group should do next and what the client needs to hear from the engagement partner.
Incident coordination for distributed consulting teams carries on after everyone is confirmed safe. Workshops move, deliverables are re-planned and travel is decided, and each needs an owner, a deadline and a place in the same record as the first alert.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is incident coordination for consulting teams?
Incident coordination for consulting teams is the process of reaching consultants wherever they are working, naming who owns the response and confirming that everyone is accounted for. It covers client sites, travel and remote working as well as the firm’s offices.
Who is responsible for consultant safety at client sites?
Responsibility is shared. The client runs the site and its emergency procedures, and in Great Britain a host employer must tell visiting workers’ employers about the risks and who runs its evacuation procedures. The consulting firm stays responsible for knowing where its people are and confirming they are safe.
How should a consulting firm account for staff who are travelling during an incident?
A consulting firm should keep groups for people travelling into or out of each city and assign someone to follow up anyone who has not replied. Each follow-up should record whether the person is safe, unaffected or still unreached. Later travel into the area belongs in the same review.
What should an incident management platform do for a distributed consulting firm?
An incident management platform should let a consulting firm reach predefined groups by engagement, location and travel, show who has acknowledged and keep a timestamped record of decisions. Those capabilities support incident coordination for consulting teams across time zones. The incident owner still makes the decisions.
Is employee safety software the same as incident coordination?
No. Employee safety software helps an individual raise an alert or get help, while incident coordination organises the wider response around that alert. A consulting firm usually needs both, connected so that one person’s alert becomes part of a managed incident.
This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the Crises Control team. Featured image: AI-generated.
