An acknowledged call is not the whole service response

## Define what the exercise actually tested

An out-of-hours service promise can rest on a surprisingly personal assumption: someone knows whom to call, and that person will answer. Experienced teams often make such arrangements work for long periods. Familiarity can therefore become evidence in the organisation's mind, even when nobody has recently examined what happens if the usual person is unavailable. At Vezquri, I wanted to understand the contact stage of our operating response before assuming that a list of familiar numbers amounted to a supported organisational arrangement.

In 2026 we ran twenty-six planned contact drills, clearly identified as tests. Twenty-two received the expected acknowledgement and four did not. These were not actual emergencies or customer incidents. The results described a defined administrative stage in a planned exercise. They did not establish whether a qualified person would attend a site, gain the necessary access or resolve an operating problem. Keeping that boundary explicit was essential. Otherwise a useful test of one dependency could become a much broader readiness claim that the exercise had never been designed to support.

The first question was not which percentage looked acceptable. It was whether each contact had reached the intended responsibility under the conditions of the exercise. The four failures required follow-up even though most contacts had been acknowledged. At the same time, the twenty-two acknowledgements did not mean the complete service had been delivered successfully twenty-two times. A management report needed to show both limits. It should make the unresolved contact gaps visible without making the successful acknowledgements stand for later actions that had not been tested.

A regional manager preferred to refresh the existing numbers and rely on experienced colleagues. He was concerned that a more formal arrangement could become cumbersome when speed mattered. That was a fair challenge. Administrative clarity can become counterproductive if it creates a process people cannot use in the actual setting. I wanted an arrangement the responsible teams could explain and exercise, not a large document whose existence would be mistaken for readiness. We therefore treated usability as part of the review while refusing to assume that personal familiarity alone settled the company's responsibility.

## Keep organisational responsibility beyond a familiar name

An individual may be competent and committed without being available whenever an organisation has implicitly promised a response. Employment arrangements, leave, competing duties and changing circumstances all matter. The business needs to understand the responsibility it has established and the support behind it. Those questions involve operating management, workforce arrangements and the appropriate safety owners. They cannot be answered merely by adding another person's mobile number or by assuming that dedication will fill any gap between a commercial promise and the resources authorised to deliver it.

We spent ₹22 lakh on the duty-contact review and supporting process changes. The amount remained a cost of examining and improving the arrangement. It was not presented as a quantified reduction in incidents or a calculation of avoided customer loss. The work sought a clearer organisational account of who should receive and acknowledge a service contact, together with a way to retain and follow up unresolved failures. The actual arrangements required the responsible teams' assessment rather than a generic sequence borrowed from another operation or published as if it were universally safe.

I also kept acknowledgement separate from permission to act. A person receiving a message does not acquire technical competence, site access or authority merely because they have answered it. Qualified technical and safety owners retained the relevant methods and acceptance responsibilities. Customer premises had their own permissions and arrangements. My role was to ensure that the organisation understood the dependencies behind its promise and funded the necessary review. I did not want a management initiative about responsiveness to create pressure for someone to cross an authority boundary in order to make a report look complete.

That distinction is especially important when a supplier and customer each control different parts of the operating setting. A customer may reasonably want assurance about the service it has purchased. The supplier may reasonably need agreed access and an appropriate account of the reported condition. Neither party benefits from an assurance so broad that it obscures those dependencies. The commercial promise should be understood alongside the arrangements that support it. Where the two do not fit, management has to address the discrepancy rather than asking an individual on duty to compensate for an unresolved organisational decision.

## Report the remaining gap without enlarging the result

A further twenty-six drills produced twenty-four acknowledgements and two unresolved failures. The later result was useful for the review, but the two sets were not a controlled study demonstrating a causal improvement in actual events. We retained the conditions of the exercise and the outstanding failures in the account. The twenty-four acknowledgements still did not establish field arrival or resolution. I wanted the report to say exactly what had been observed, because an expanded claim would have weakened the value of the exercise even while making its headline appear more successful.

One temptation was to describe the later outcome as proof that the response system was ready. Another was to focus only on the remaining failures and dismiss the acknowledgements as unimportant. Both positions would lose useful information. The test showed something about the contact stage and identified further work. It did not settle every question about the service, and it was not meaningless because its scope was limited. A sound operating account should be capable of holding those two ideas together without forcing every exercise into the category of complete success or complete failure.

I asked management to keep responsibility for follow-up visible. An unresolved result can become familiar over time, particularly if it is repeatedly reproduced in a report without a decision about the next action. The answer is not to mark it complete for convenience. It is to establish who should examine it, what authority and resources they need, and how the next decision will be brought back through the appropriate operating process. That approach does not imply a particular technical response. It makes the management obligation around unfinished work explicit while leaving specialist judgement where it belongs.

For a board, the relevant questions concern the promise, the dependencies and the evidence used to describe readiness. What part of the service was exercised? Which conditions were assumed? What remains untested or unresolved? How does management reconcile the commercial undertaking with actual capability and permissions? Directors should be able to ask those questions without becoming the people who operate the duty arrangement. The distinction protects both useful oversight and clear executive accountability. A committee report should help the board understand an exposure, not invite it to improvise an operating instruction.

The experience also made me more careful about language in customer discussions. A test result can be communicated positively without losing its scope. Saying that the contact exercise revealed gaps and prompted further work is a meaningful account of responsible management. Calling it proof of complete response readiness would ask the customer to rely on something the organisation had not established. The more consequential the promise, the more important it is that the description remain tied to the evidence rather than to the confidence a polished presentation can create.

My practical conclusion is to give a small test an honest job. It can examine a dependency, expose a weakness and support a decision about further work. It need not prove the whole service to be valuable. At Vezquri, the contact exercises helped us see where an assumption about familiar people needed a clearer organisational basis. Two failures remained unresolved, and later stages still required their own assessment. Preserving that unfinished account was part of fulfilling the operating responsibility, not an admission that the exercise had been pointless.