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IntermediateLEADERSHIP
You are responsible for executing an urgent system patch outside business hours but a key stakeholder insists on delaying due to perceived risk. How would you handle the conversation, obtain approval, and execute the task while minimizing business impact?
IT graduate trainee
General

Sample Answer

When I encountered this at my last internship, we had a zero-day kernel fix that needed an off-hours patch across 120 servers supporting ~2,000 daily users. A product owner pushed back worried about customer impact. I listened, acknowledged the risk, then laid out a concise mitigation plan: quick verification in a staging cluster (30 minutes), a tested rollback script, a scheduled 45-minute maintenance window after midnight, and real-time monitoring with a runbook and a two-person rollback team. I summarized the plan in an approval email and a 10-minute call; the stakeholder approved within 20 minutes. We applied the patch, monitored metrics (CPU and error rate) for 60 minutes, and saw no regressions. Uptime impact was under 0.05% and the vulnerability was closed within 6 hours of discovery.

Keywords

Acknowledge stakeholder concerns and build trustPresent a clear mitigation plan with rollback and monitoringGet time-boxed approval and document itMinimize impact with staging tests and off-hours window
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