Scheduled maintenance of IT systems is an almost unavoidable part of life. However, your IT systems are the backbone of your organization and employees rely on them to be able to do their work. By appropriately communicating with employees ahead of time, you can help make the process less painful for everyone involved. And that is why you need a scheduled maintenance email template.
Table of contents
The importance of communicating scheduled maintenance
Best practice for communicating scheduled maintenance
How to announce scheduled maintenance
Examples of scheduled maintenance messages
The importance of communicating scheduled maintenance
We know why the scheduled maintenance itself is crucial – without it, there could be security problems, bugs might go unfixed, and new features may be unavailable to users. However, appropriate and timely communication is just as important as the maintenance itself.
Before you announce the scheduled maintenance to your employees, it’s important that you understand what impact it is going to have on them and their work. Asking yourself these key questions can then help you to devise an appropriate announcement:
- Will all your services be taken offline?
- Is the software one that is a priority for your employees?
- What will be the impact on service delivery?
- Will external customers or other stakeholders be affected?
- Will it affect all users in the company or just some?
- How long will the maintenance last?
- Is it unavoidable to do this during regular work hours?
- Are there any actions you need your employees to take?
Only after you have all the answers, start creating maintenance notifications.
When it comes to communicating with employees, you should ensure you give them plenty of notice. After all, unlike unplanned outages, you know when a planned one will happen, so letting people know ahead of time will help them prepare for the systems being unavailable. In case of system maintenance, email sent in advance is able to prevent company losses and improve the IT department's reputation.
Best practice for communicating scheduled maintenance
Best practice for communicating scheduled maintenance to your employees includes:
- The bigger the impact, the more notice you should give.
- Don’t just send one reminder: schedule multiple reminders so people don’t forget.
- Use a variety of communication channels.
- If there are going to be significant impacts, you need to be clear about what they are and what people need to do.
- If it is a minor upgrade, you may not need to send alerts…it is important not to bombard people with too much information but rather find the right mix.
- Use scheduled maintenance templates to save time.
- Know your audience and communicate appropriately. If the outage affects everyone in the organization, then you need to send notifications to everyone. However, suppose only a handful of employees will be affected. In that case, you should send to a custom audience only – people who get irrelevant information can become annoyed and will stop reading your future communications.
How to announce scheduled maintenance
Sending your information via different channels is a must – for example, you can send pop-up notifications to advise when scheduled maintenance is going to happen.
Scrolling desktop tickers are a good way of updating employees throughout the maintenance process, particularly if the downtime is shorter or longer than anticipated. Don’t forget about those employees who aren’t always at their desks: send a text message or notification via an employee app to make sure they are aware of scheduled outages that could affect their work.
As mentioned above, having IT outage templates pre-prepared and ready to go will help you to save time when you have scheduled maintenance to announce.
Our top tips for using these templates are:
- Have templates for different types of maintenance – eg: major upgrades vs minor upgrades, server maintenance, downtime, etc.
- Have templates for different parts of the scheduled maintenance process – in the lead up and then when the maintenance has concluded.
- Use simple, easy-to-understand language – your employees are not IT experts.
- Include what the impacts are and what it means for users.
- Include any steps the employee needs to take.
- Include a time estimate for the disruption.
- If you need to, include contact details for more information or help.
- If necessary, explain why the maintenance needs to take place (eg: urgent patching or bug repair to keep the business safe).
- Once the template is filled out, you can schedule the content to be sent at a specific time.
- When scheduling the content, you can also select the audience you want it to go to.
Examples of scheduled maintenance messages
Here are some examples of scheduled maintenance messages you can send by email, pop-up, scrolling ticker, SMS and more.
Use these text to create messages and alerts for your own use cases - you can prepare the website under maintenance email template, or server downtime email sample in advance, to be ready to send them in 2 sec when it is time.
>> Download 9 more IT outage message templates <<
1. Scheduled maintenance email template
Attention users of (software/service name):
Please be aware that (software/service) will be unavailable at (date/time) to (date/time) as the IT team will be performing scheduled maintenance at this time.
During this time, you will be unable to (insert what functions will be affected). Before maintenance takes place, please make sure you (list any steps here that the employee needs to take). The IT team will advise when the maintenance is complete and services have been restored.
This maintenance is necessary for (list reasons). We apologize for any inconvenience.
What will be affected: (list services affected)
What won’t be affected: (list services not affected)
For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact the IT Team at (contact details).
2. Scheduled maintenance completed email template
Attention users of (software/service name):
The scheduled maintenance of (software/service) has now concluded. Access should now be restored. The maintenance was necessary for (list reasons).
If you are having any issues using (software/service), please contact the IT Team at (contact details). Thank you for your patience.
3. Scheduled server maintenance email template (server maintenance message to users)
Please be aware that we will be performing routine server maintenance on (date/time) to (date/time). This is necessary for server performance and also (any other reasons).
As a result, the following systems/functions will be unavailable during this time:
(list of services).
Before maintenance takes place, please make sure you (list any steps here that the employee needs to take). The IT team will advise when the server maintenance is complete and services have been restored.
For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact the IT Team at (contact details).
4. Scheduled downtime email template
Please be advised that there will be scheduled downtime across our network from (date/time) to (date/time). This is because we are performing work on (functions/parts of the network).
As a result, you may experience problems accessing the following services during this time:
(list of services)
We apologize for any inconvenience.
For more information, or if you have any questions, please contact the IT Team at (contact details).
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Keeping your employees informed about scheduled maintenance will help them plan and ease their frustrations, particularly when you show you understand their impact on them.
