I was on a panel at the DevOps Summit by Forefront Events today, on Incident Management: Leading Organisational Resilience Through Critical Incidents. I was joined by Roy Alingcastre and Andrew Burton, and the session was moderated by Niall McCarthy. The photo is of us just before we started.
We covered a few topics that tend to divide people in this field. These included the minimum information required to open an incident, whether an incident necessarily means an outage, and whether you need more than two severity levels in incident response. We also got into whether an incident is resolved once things are stabilised or only once the underlying issue is remediated. I drew on my time as the incident coordinator for the major incident management team at a previous organisation when giving my views, because that is where most of my opinions on these questions came from.
Niall did a really good job of keeping the audience involved. He ran live polls and took hot topics from the floor, he read the room and drove the conversation to where people wanted it to go. It was also interesting to see how differently people in the room answered some of those polls, which says a lot about how little standardisation there still is in how organisations define and run incidents.
Thanks to Niall, Roy and Andrew for a great discussion, and to Forefront Events for having me.
