Incident Management Policy Template WORD

Standard Operating Procedure: Incident Management Policy

1. Executive Summary & Purpose

This policy establishes the systematic framework for identifying, analyzing, and resolving service interruptions or security breaches at Template Registry. The objective is to restore normal service operations as rapidly as possible, minimize adverse impact on business functions, and ensure proactive post-incident optimization.

2. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: Applies to all production infrastructure, cloud services, internal applications, and data handling workflows.
• Required Tools: PagerDuty (Alerting), Slack (Communication), Jira (Tracking), Datadog/CloudWatch (Observability), Confluence (Knowledge Base).
• Prerequisites: All responders must possess active VPN credentials, defined IAM permissions, and access to the "Incident Command" Slack channel.

3. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI)

4. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase I: Detection & Classification

• Log incident in the #incident-war-room channel.
• Determine severity level: SEV-1 (Critical/Outage), SEV-2 (Degraded), SEV-3 (Minor).
• Verify impact via observability dashboards.

Phase II: Containment & Resolution

• Containment: Isolate affected services/nodes to prevent cascading failure.
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Identify the triggering event.
• Mitigation: Execute rollback, patch, or configuration change.
• Verification: Confirm service stability via automated smoke tests.

Phase III: Recovery & Reporting

• Declare "Resolved" status and document timestamp.
• Initiate Post-Mortem within 48 hours of resolution.
• Update internal documentation/runbooks based on findings.

5. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

Best Practices:

• Blame-Free Culture: Focus on systemic failure points, not individual actions.
• Single Source of Truth: All updates must occur in the Jira ticket linked to the Slack incident channel.
• Communication Cadence: For SEV-1 incidents, issue stakeholder updates every 30 minutes, regardless of progress status.

Metric Thresholds:

• MTTD (Mean Time to Detect): < 5 minutes.
• MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve): < 60 minutes for SEV-1.
• SLA Compliance: 99.99% uptime target.

6. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: At what point do I escalate an incident? A: Escalate to an SEV-1 immediately if any customer-facing production environment is inaccessible or if data integrity is compromised. When in doubt, escalate.

Q: Can I skip the post-mortem if the incident was minor? A: No. A "Blame-Free Post-Mortem" is required for every incident. For SEV-3, a brief summary report in the Jira ticket suffices.

Q: Who is authorized to communicate with external clients during an incident? A: Only the designated Incident Commander or the PR/Communications Lead may provide official statements. All other personnel must defer to the standard "We are aware of an issue and are investigating" response.

Authorized by: Julian Vance, Chief Architect, Template Registry