Some people believe that unless their company has a culture of direct communication and performance management, incident management will fail.

That's not true! While that sort of culture might make incident management a bit easier, it's not at all required.

When incident management fails, it's usually because the continuous improvement effort stops, not because it was ineffective.

To prevent the work from stopping, match your incident management approach to your company culture.

If the company culture is matter-of-fact and high paced, that'll do. Use public communication, leverage Occam's Razor, and push for quick resolution.

If the company culture is reserved and deliberate, no problem at all. Be careful not to embarrass anyone in public, be more thorough in your root cause analysis, and manage projects formally.

If you notice that someone is responding negatively to an incident, ask yourself how you can make the incident management process as culture-consistent and gentle possible. It's easier to change the incident management process to match their expectations and sensitivities than vice versa.

Your organization has years of profitable experience with its current culture, and you'll do best by working with it, not against it.

That's not to say that all cultures are created equally - that's not true either.

But you don't have to wait for a perfect performance-oriented culture to get to work solving the root causes of recurring incidents.

Leadership may recognize opportunities to improve the culture along the way, and that's great. Hoist those insights out of your incident management efforts and continue with the culture as it is in the meantime.

XBE is always looking for ways to make incident management as effective as possible for any type of company. If you have any related feature ideas, please let us know.

Regards,

Sean Devine
Founder & CEO, XBE