10 questions teams should be asking for faster incident response

The State of Digital Operations Report by PagerDuty highlights the significant changes in incident response experienced by technical teams from 2019 to 2020, driven by a 19% increase in critical incidents. Despite the rise in incidents, teams successfully reduced the mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), indicating enhanced accountability and efficiency through prolonged use of PagerDuty. The report emphasizes the importance of optimizing the incident response lifecycle, which includes stages such as detection, preventing customer impact, diagnosing issues, resolving them, and learning from each incident. By posing critical questions at each stage, teams can refine their operations to respond more effectively and mitigate cognitive toil. Furthermore, the report discusses the necessity of efficient collaboration and communication, both within teams and with external stakeholders, to minimize business impact. It also stresses the value of post-incident learning and continuous improvement to handle the increasing volume of incidents, especially amidst challenges like the Great Resignation, urging teams to work smarter instead of harder.