5 Steps To Cross the Operational Chasm in Incident Management

Building resilient operations that ensure high availability and reliability is essential for maintaining customer loyalty and, ultimately, business growth. According to recent research, nine out of 10 IT leaders believe that outages or disruptions have reduced customer trust in their organization.

The path to achieving operational excellence is one of prevention and learning, infused across the incident management process, one where teams operate confidently and efficiently by embracing proactive measures and post-incident reviews instead of getting stuck in firefighting mode.

Crossing the operational chasm from reactive to proactive incident management is mandatory to reduce operating costs and save team capacity to accelerate innovation — essential in delivering exceptional service, even in the face of unexpected challenges.

Here are five steps to help organizations get started on the journey toward operational excellence.

1: Scale Service Ownership to Operate More Efficiently

The disjointed nature of manual incident management processes is a major challenge for organizations. Distributed teams often work with disparate tools and workflows, making coordination difficult during critical incidents. On average, the mean time to remediation (MTTR) takes 1 hour and 18 minutes longer when incidents are manually resolved compared to automated incident management processes.

Using platforms that are built to scale a full-service ownership model across the organization can leverage various operating models (centralized to decentralized) and orchestrate response across teams throughout the incident life cycle. The standardization of DevOps best practices powers this approach. It drives accountability and cross-team collaboration while empowering teams to do their best work by automating repetitive tasks and focusing time on innovation, helping to reduce the impact of major incidents and outages.

2: Use AI and Automation to Deflect Noise

Limited visibility into the organization’s infrastructure and potential points of failure often limits teams to adopt a reactive incident management posture. For example, network operations centers (NOC) traditionally favor an eyes-on-glass model that is too human-intensive and error-prone to effectively triage the overwhelming volume of data coming into the enterprise today.

Event-driven automation uses AI and machine learning to surface only critical work that needs human attention and intervention. It can suppress and group alerts while kickstarting triage and auto-remediation to deflect noise. Alternatively, it can determine that more diagnostic information is needed and notify teams to look into it. This empowers responders to auto-remediate lower-priority issues and focus on high-impact incidents that drive business value — innovation, efficiency and superior customer experience.

With intelligent incident detection and proactive issue resolution, teams can anticipate and address issues before they escalate, significantly reducing response times and improving overall incident management practices. Furthermore, AI-driven analytics can help uncover patterns and trends that might elude human analysis, ensuring more resilient and efficient systems.

3: Foster Proactive Cross-Functional Collaboration

A siloed approach to incident management slows down decision-making and harms cross-team communication during incidents. Instead, organizations must cultivate a cross-functional culture where all team members are able to collaborate seamlessly.

Cross-functional collaboration ensures that incident response plans are comprehensive and account for the insights and expertise contained within specific teams. This communication can be expedited with the support of AI tools to summarize information and draft messages, as well as the use of automation for sharing regular updates. This instills trust among stakeholders and facilitates knowledge sharing to accelerate resolution.

4: Bring Guided Remediation to Where Responders Work

Many responders collaborate with ChatOps tools to get the response process moving. In fact, it is possible to manage an incident end-to-end without ever leaving Slack or Microsoft Teams, minimizing context switching to boost efficiency, cut coordination costs and get faster resolution.

But more than creating dedicated incident channels and quickly adding responders and subject matter experts, teams can also benefit from incident management platforms that bring guided remediation capabilities to the chat. A notable example is the ability to assign roles and tasks directly in chat to drive accountability and eliminate guesswork or even determine incident types to drive a tailored response process for specific scenarios.

Additionally, generative AI chatbots can provide contextual support and actionable insights to responders, rendering them even more effective when trying to resolve quickly. Plus, the chat history can be automatically ingested and summarized in a newly created post-incident review, facilitating the process of turning incidents into opportunities to learn and unlock operational resilience.

5: Improve Resiliency With Post-Incident Reviews

An important step in developing a proactive incident management strategy is conducting post-incident reviews. When incidents are resolved, teams are often so busy that they are forced to move on without examining the contributing factors or identifying where processes can be improved.

Conducting blameless reviews after significant incidents — and ideally every incident — is crucial for continuously and iteratively improving the systems in which incidents occur. This should cover both the technological and human aspects. Reviews must be thorough and uncover process flaws, training gaps or system vulnerabilities to improve incident management.

Effectively documenting the findings of these reviews — a process that can be accelerated with the support of AI tools — helps organizations improve resilience and reduce the impact of future incidents. A continuous learning mindset transforms each incident into an opportunity for driving improved incident management maturity.

Incidents Are Inevitable: Firefighting Isn’t

Incidents will keep happening, so organizations need to focus on how to better withstand them. By crossing the operational chasm — from legacy, reactive ways of working to proactive, automated incident management — organizations can work faster and smarter to improve the availability and reliability of their services. Ultimately, this transformation will improve the customer experience and pave the way for sustainable, ongoing business growth.

Débora Cambé is a product marketing manager at PagerDuty supporting the company’s Incident Response go-to-market initiatives. Her 10+ years of experience as a marketing professional include working as owned media manager at PlayStation and as social media consultant for Yorn,…

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