Major Incident

Hello Everyone, this template can be used for Major incidents which happen in your Business, I have created this and based it off something I created for a Major Incident review meeting within a support team in a software/Engineering department. It has been a highly effective way of reviewing a Major incident and I hope it helps for you too.

There is a link to my website and a YOUTUBE video to show you how to facilitate this meeting Step by Step.

I have also made this template accessible for those with Colourblindness.

Instructions:

Step 1

Give it the 3-minute wait, people have all sorts of reasons for joining late, lets's give people a little bit of time to join but crack on without them if they haven't joined after a few minutes.

I like to send out the template at least a day before the meeting because it's fairly self-explanatory and people can write down their thoughts if they are unable to make the session.

You can also play some music to set the tone before a meeting, I would say instrumental music works best.

Step 2

Let them know why they are there! Say what the business has named the incident (e.g. 'Partner/Client unable to access login page resulting in zero usage of the application'). Before this meeting you would have put down the aims of this meeting, so explain it to others as you'll be bringing back the focus point to complete these aims so that conversations don't go off track.

Step 3

Go through the timeline, and let the attendees know what focal points you want to pay attention to in the meeting and the duration, this will help you bring the conversations back to focus and can time box conversations. For example, if you wanted to finish off an incident report or go through a timeline of the events which happened during the incident you can schedule time for that before the retrospective activity. This will help jog people's memory, collate different pieces of information together and get partner/client reports done on time.

Step 4

The retrospective, Before the meeting, make sure you know what you want them to retrospect on in the end-to-end stages of this incident. It's a good idea to focus on problem areas that occur so that you can create actions together on how to prevent them next time. An example could be for the title ' How can communication be improved in these end-to-end stages of the incident' or 'How can gathering information be improved in these end-to-end stages of the incident'...

Step 5

Go through the 3 types of post-it notes that people can write, this will really help identify which tickets identify positives, improvements, or problem areas.

Give them some time for individuals to write their thoughts in the different columns, for example, 10-20 mins.

After they have done that go through what each person has written, you can also create actions at the same time if people have identified ways to improve processes for next time.

Step 6

End the meeting, If the retrospective was the last item on your timetable then thank everyone for their participation and end the call :)