Incidents are inevitable. What separates resilient organizations from the rest is not whether they experience incidents, but how effectively they respond when problems arise. A well-structured war room process can mean the difference between a minor disruption and a major crisis.
After managing hundreds of critical incidents across my career, I’ve distilled my key learnings into this guide. These battle-tested practices have repeatedly proven their value in high-pressure situations.
Initialization
The first minutes of an incident response are critical. Having clear, consistent procedures for war room initialization ensures a swift and organized start to your incident management process.
Key Elements of Initialization:
- Single-access point: Always have one consistent link for all war rooms that everyone can access quickly. This eliminates confusion about where to go when an incident occurs.
- Universal access: Everyone in the organization should have access to this link, even if they don’t typically participate in incident response. This allows subject matter experts to join immediately when needed.
- Pre-configured environment: Set up standard tools and dashboards in advance, so they’re ready when an incident occurs.
- Automated notifications: Implement automated alerting to notify the appropriate teams when a war room is initiated.
- Initialization checklist: Create a standardized procedure for declaring an incident and starting the war room process.
Clear Role Definition
Effective war rooms require clear responsibilities. Each participant should understand their specific role and boundaries of authority.
Core Roles:
Incident Manager:
- Leads the overall response
- Makes final decisions when consensus can’t be reached
- Ensures the response follows established processes
- Manages escalations when needed
- Declares when the incident is resolved
Scribe:
- Documents all significant events, decisions, and actions in real-time
- Maintains a timeline of the incident
- Captures action items for follow-up
- Ensures all key information is accessible to war room participants
Communications Person:
- Manages external and internal communications
- Drafts and sends updates to stakeholders at regular intervals
- Fields inquiries from other parts of the organization
- Ensures consistent messaging about the incident
Actors:
- Technical resources performing the actual investigation and remediation
- Provide expertise in specific systems or technologies
- Execute changes and verify results
- Report findings back to the war room
Effective Practices
The structure and approach of your war room significantly impact its effectiveness. Well-designed practices help maintain focus and productivity during high-stress situations.
Recommended Practices:
- Shared visibility: Maintain one shared screen that everyone can see, showing the primary investigation or discussion. All key actions should be performed visibly to the entire team.
- Sub-team breakouts: When a specific line of inquiry requires focused attention, create separate rooms with the same role structure. These breakout teams should report findings back to the main war room regularly.
- Regular status updates: Schedule brief status updates at consistent intervals to ensure everyone has the same understanding of the current situation.
- Engineering pairing: All changes should be made by a pair of engineers, not a single person. Pairing ensures instant review and is critical to correct solutioning. This reduces errors and provides redundancy of knowledge during critical moments.
- Clear decision-making framework: Establish in advance how decisions will be made during an incident (consensus, incident manager decision, etc.).
- Time-boxing: Set time limits for investigation paths to avoid rabbit holes. Re-evaluate progress regularly.
- Documentation first: Ensure all hypotheses, findings, and actions are documented before they’re acted upon.
- Standardized RCA template: Maintain a consistent RCA template that captures all necessary information: incident timeline, impact assessment, root cause identification, contributing factors, and action items. Standardization ensures comprehensive analysis and makes RCAs easier to compare and learn from over time.
- Centralized knowledge repository: Establish a shared Google Drive, SharePoint, or similar solution where all RCAs are stored and accessible to everyone in the organization. This transparency builds institutional knowledge and allows teams to learn from past incidents regardless of their direct involvement.
War Room Etiquette
The discipline and focus of war room participants can make or break your incident response. Clear expectations for behavior help maintain an effective environment.
Etiquette Guidelines:
- Speak purposefully: Don’t talk unless you have something meaningful to contribute. Background chatter makes it difficult to focus on critical information.
- Respect role boundaries: Trust people in their designated roles to perform their functions without interference.
- Minimize distractions: Turn off notifications and avoid multitasking during active incident response.
- Stay focused on resolution: Keep discussions centered on understanding and resolving the current incident. Save process improvement discussions for after the incident.
- Use clear, direct communication: Avoid ambiguous language. Be specific about what you’re seeing, what you believe is happening, and what you’re doing.
- Mind cognitive load: Recognize that everyone’s mental capacity is limited during high-stress situations, and communicate accordingly.
Post-Incident Activities
How you handle the aftermath of an incident is just as important as the initial response. Effective post-incident processes turn experiences into organizational learning.
Post-Incident Process:
- RCA assignment: The Incident Manager assigns root cause analysis responsibilities to a smaller group with relevant expertise.
- Blameless postmortem: Conduct a thorough review focused on systems and processes, not individual mistakes.
- Action item tracking: Document and assign follow-up items with clear ownership and timelines.
- Knowledge sharing: Distribute learnings from the incident throughout the organization.
- Process refinement: Update war room procedures based on lessons learned from each incident.
- Recognition: Acknowledge the contributions of all participants in the incident response.