At Dash 2020 hosted by Datadog, I attended a talk given by Brad Peterson and Donald Beery titled “NASDAQ: Market Resiliency in the Age of COVID-19”. This post aims to write up a general schema for contingency planned for managing a large application that has many users with constant contact based on the information I learned during the talk.

The biggest thing that was stressed during the talk by the presenters was open communication across all levels of staff. The reason that NASDAQ was able to respond so efficiently to the stay at home mandates was the practice of that very scenario prior to it being needed. NASDAQ has a contingency plan in place where all of the staff transitioned to working from home, and they practiced executing that contingency plan. Also having backup gateways for staff to login from while working at home was something found to be necessary during these practice runs. Implementing them and practicing them allowed for a seamless work from home set up.

The biggest changes seen in the behind the scenes support at NASDAQ was supporting the increased volume of trading seen in 2020. They also staff at two times the capacity of the previous day, but did work to expand their staffing and software support up to five times capacity by optimizing in the background. This was necessary to meet the demand seen in March 2020.

Fielding this growth was made possible by focusing on these three things while transitioning to a work from home set up. First, connection, then visualization, and lastly communication were the three big focal points for the migration. Connection meant ensuring that every employee had access to internet and was able to configure their own VPN. Visualization actually didn’t refer to video calls, but ensuring everyone had a clear picture of the goals from the meta big picture view down to the minutia of a task list for the day. Communication included not just video and audio chats, but also transcription of those conversations for those that could not connect at that time. For example, there are two team handoffs daily, from the US to Lithuania and back. Part of the shift report exchanged during the handoff might include the transcribed notes from an earlier meeting.

After Hurricane Sandy, eight years ago NASDAQ learned the importance of contingency planning and has put those lessons to use in this unprecedented time.

References: Live Tweet Thread