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Most Companies Wait Too Long to Declare Incidents | Brent Chapman

greatcircle.com · 1,549 words · saved by 2 readers

The cause is almost always the incentives (both explicit and implicit) that your company has built around declaration.

Most companies have some notion of what an “incident” is: a significant problem that requires an urgent response and involves multiple responders. But having a definition and actually using it are two different things. Teams at most companies I’ve worked with know perfectly well what an incident is, at least in theory. In practice, they still hesitate to declare one, for reasons that have nothing to do with the definition. The pattern is remarkably consistent. An engineer sees something that looks wrong and thinks “maybe it’s not that bad.” A team notices a problem that could be an…

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