The Incident Is The Way: Using Your Incidents to Win Reliability Investment

When organisations face a high severity incident they experience a moment of consensus, all parts of the organisation want to see a serious problem solved as quickly as possible. Behind an incident's alerts, on-call pages and status updates is an alignment that in any other context is fleeting and rarely repeated. In this talk we discuss how choices we make during incident management; from who contributes, to how we describe harm, to how we communicate updates; can build an investment dialogue with decision-makers.

When distributed systems ensure everything is a SEV 01 to someone, building a common context for our responses converts our incidents into successful investment arguments.