Great Circle Waypoints Blog

Come join me at next week's BayLISA meeting in San Jose, as I'll be speaking about Learning from the Fire Department: Experiences with Incident Command for IT. I'll be sharing key lessons, along with a few war stories, from companies such as Google, Heroku, and...

Was your last outage a triumph, or a tragedy? Was it like Apollo 13, or more like Titanic? Are you ready for your next outage? Are you prepared to respond quickly, smoothly, effectively, and efficiently? Users expect uptime, all the time, and it's critical to your...

I'm excited to share that I just signed the venue contract for a full-day "Mastering Outages" public class on incident management, for here in the SF Bay Area on Friday 18 May 2018. I'll be posting full details shortly, as I get everything else set up, but you should...

Effective incident management matters because it both reduces downtime for your service, and reduces the impact of dealing with that downtime on your staff. That obviously impacts users, but outages also have a huge impact on your staff, and particularly on the ongoing work of the organization. If you’re not careful, they can lead to a toxic cycle. […]

Everybody wants to be a hero when there’s an outage or similar service problem, swooping in to save the day with their knowledge, skill, and wisdom, and then reaping their reward of praise and adulation from management and peers. However, if heroics are what you reward, then you’ll get more heroics, and that’s not good for your team or your service. Instead, you should prepare to respond *without* heroics, by using good incident management practices, and reward folks for avoiding the need for heroics. […]

“Routine emergency” might seem like an oxymoron, but it’s a good description of effective incident management. Dealing with an emergency doesn’t have to be a crisis; with good incident management practices, it can be routine. […]