An Organizational Response to Incidents: Designing for Smooth Coordination in High Tempo, Large Scale Software Incident Response

In the Incident Command System (ICS) framework, the Incident Commander role has long attracted organizational attention for selection, training, and competency identification. But, the majority of participants in an incident response are "followers" who carry out the direction of the commanders. So, making the incident responder group better overall is a force multiplier.

This talk draws from primary research to explore the role of the follower and the characteristics of good "followship." It also looks at the organizational preconditions that aid in incident response—both the everyday work of incident response and in large-scale software outages.

This talk is relevant to leaders and followers who carry a pager and, more generally, to teams looking to improve communication, coordination, and collaboration both internally amongst members and externally across organizational boundaries. Attendees will leave this session with new ideas of how to structure their incident management functions, along with practical tactics and strategies for use in their next outage.