Xavier Bennet · practice card · major incident

Before the first bridge

1. 1Declare when customer impact is real, or when you cannot rule it out in minutes. Do not wait for a perfect severity.
2. 2One bridge. One incident commander. Everyone else contributes. They do not chair.
3. 3First update: impact, what we are doing, next clock. No cause.
4. 4The next update is a time, not “soon”.
5. 5Freeze further change unless it is the restore.
6. 6A second occurrence is a problem, not another incident with the same title.
7. 7Emergency change still needs a rollback and a record.
8. 8A post-incident review without an owner and a date did not produce an action.
9. 9If the crisis or DR path has not been spoken out loud this year, you do not have one.

How a team uses this

1. Pick one incident from the last month.
2. Read each line out loud.
3. Mark the lines the room did not do. Those are the practice, not a new framework.