Comparison
IncidentvsIncident commander
Incident
you declared it before you knew how bad it was, because declaring is cheap and being late is not.
A disruption or imminent disruption that requires an urgent, coordinated response. It is a process word rather than a severity word: declaring one is what summons the roles, the channel and the timeline, and doing it early is almost always correct. Teams that hesitate to declare usually have a process that punishes declaring, which is the thing to fix rather than the hesitation.
Full entry →Incident commander
one person stopped debugging, started coordinating, and the channel got quieter and faster.
The single person accountable for coordinating an incident response: assigning work, deciding, and keeping communication flowing. The role is deliberately separate from doing the technical work, because the person deepest in the logs is the worst placed to track the whole picture. It is not a seniority role, and a well-run organisation lets whoever holds it direct people far more senior for the duration.
Full entry →