When things break: a plan, not a panic

When things break: a plan, not a panic

I set up and have maintained an on-call rota, using Jira Service Desk with Google Calendar integrations, along with a status page for outage updates. I've led on incidents ranging from short-lived issues affecting specific clients to outages affecting everyone, and I've been directly involved in producing the business's disaster recovery process, from the technical estate to business-level comms and ownership.

• It was always clear who was on call.
• Customers could follow an outage on the status page rather than chasing for updates.
• Each major outage left behind an explanation, a runbook and a list of fixes.
• The business knew who owned what, and who told whom, if the worst happened.