Free Tech Talks on Incident Management
Build your team’s incident management expertise with a complimentary 1-hour tech talk. These sessions are perfect as keynotes for team meetings, corporate events, and interest group gatherings, effectively generating interest, fostering support, and increasing engagement for your incident management initiatives.
Choose from two impactful talks:
- Learning from the Fire Department: An engaging introduction, requiring little experience with incident management.
- Incident Response and Incident Analysis: A deep dive for seasoned professionals seeking to sharpen their expertise.
Join industry leaders like LinkedIn, Atlassian, Pivotal, and Okta, who have already benefited from these transformative sessions!
Introductory Talk: Learning from the Fire Department
Learn the secrets behind the incident management success of legends like Google, Slack, Amazon, and PagerDuty. This compelling introductory talk reveals key lessons (and a few war stories!) from how these companies have adapted the public safety world’s Incident Command System (ICS), including:
- Why incident response is an indispensable IT capability.
- The critical distinction between “normal” and “emergency” operations.
- How ICS principles translate to IT incidents.
- Simple yet powerful modifications to ICS practices for superior IT outcomes.
- The communication tools that truly shine during incident response.
- The surprising power of checklists as an under-appreciated tool.
- Why blameless incident reviews are the cornerstone of incident response improvement.
- How senior managers can inadvertently derail incident response (and how to prevent it!).
This talk is for IT professionals, including developers, sysadmins, DBAs, DevOps engineers, test/QA engineers, managers, executives, and related specialists such as product, program, and project managers, and customer/user support staff. If you’re involved in or impacted by incident management, this session offers valuable insights.
Advanced Talk: Incident Response and Incident Analysis
Incident Response and Incident Analysis are two essential components of an effective Incident Management program, each enhancing the other. While analyzing incidents after they occur is valuable, the data collected during the incident response provides unique insights into what happened and why. A thorough analysis isn’t complete without critically examining the response itself—identifying what worked well, what didn’t, and how to better prepare for future incidents.
So, how can you optimize your incident response to enrich your analysis, and conversely, how can your analysis refine your incident response?
This talk offers actionable recommendations for improving both incident response and subsequent analysis. It outlines straightforward yet effective steps that can be taken during an incident to ensure a more comprehensive and insightful review afterward. These real-time tactical adjustments aim to capture crucial data and observations that are often overlooked in the heat of the moment, thereby enhancing the depth and value of post-incident analysis.
Additionally, the talk provides guidance on conducting incident reviews with the goal of transforming each review into a powerful feedback loop that directly improves future incident responses, operational resilience, and overall system design.
By adopting these practices, organizations can foster a culture of continuous improvement, turning every incident from a setback into a valuable opportunity for learning, growth, and enhanced preparedness.
This advanced presentation is designed for experienced incident management professionals eager to elevate their skills.
Brent delivered a fascinating talk that sparked a number of important followup conversations within and between our teams, easily a top 5 guest tech talk.
Schedule your free tech talk today!
Brent Chapman
I am an expert in emergency management for IT services, specializing in guiding companies to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and learn from emergencies. I work from a strong background in IT infrastructure, site reliability engineering (SRE), and public safety emergency management.
Slack recruited me to lead incident response and incident management for their Engineering organization and the company as a whole. I designed and built Slack’s incident management capabilities; ensured smooth day-to-day incident management operations; helped the company learn from, prevent, and prepare for incidents; and shared Slack’s incident management story with our customers and the industry.
As a leader in Google’s legendary SRE organization, I convinced senior management of the need to strengthen and standardize the company’s incident management practices. I created the Incident Management at Google (IMAG) system, which is now used throughout the company, and helped refine the Postmortems at Google (PMAG) system, which enables the company to learn from incidents of all sizes.
I bring a unique perspective to my work in IT, with experience as a former air search and rescue pilot and incident commander, an emergency dispatcher and dispatch supervisor for major arts and music festivals, and a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) member and instructor.
Throughout my career, I have designed, built, managed, and scaled IT infrastructure and teams for various organizations, from startups to major corporations such as Google, Apple, Slack, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Netflix. I have collaborated with numerous organizations in Silicon Valley and globally, as well as with various non-profit and government entities. Additionally, I am the co-author of the highly regarded O’Reilly book Building Internet Firewalls, a developer of widely used open-source software, and a popular speaker at conferences worldwide.
My rare combination of experience as an emergency manager, technology manager, people manager, software developer, network/systems engineer, and educator allows me to quickly and effectively dive in, assess a situation, and deliver results.
Great Circle Associates, Inc.
www.greatcircle.com
info@greatcircle.com
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