Over at "The ITSM Review" I talk about Major Incident planning
The topic came up during a conversation with a customer about the best way to handle Major Incidents. We agreed that it doesn't require a massive change to the standard model for handling Incidents, but communication is the key.
Short excerpt below and head over to the ITSM Review for the full article.
Recently I've been working on Incident Management, and specifically on Major Incident planning.
During my time in IT Operations I saw teams handle Major Incidents in a number of different ways. I actually found that in some cases all process and procedure went out of the window during a Major Incident, which has a horrible irony about it. Logically it would seem that this is the time that applying more process to the situation would help, especially in the area of communications.
For example in an organisation I worked in previously we had a run of Storage Area Network outages. The first couple caused absolute mayhem and I could see people pushing back against the idea of breaking out the process-book because all that mattered was finding the technical fix and getting the storage back up and running.
At the end of the Incident, once we'd restored the service we found that we, maybe unsurprisingly had a lot of unhappy customers! Our retrospective on that Incident showed us that taking just a short time at the beginning of the outage to sort out our communications plan would have helped the users a lot.
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