RFC: incident review preparation and facilitation while on-call

[ovasdi]

Proposing a new process change around the preparation and facilitation of incident reviews.

[mdole]

Sounds reasonable to me! Very thorough proposal, thanks @ovasdi.

If this is adopted, let's repeat it ad nauseam (in eng standup, slack, maybe an email) to make sure that on-call engineers understand that this is expected of them

[mc-jones]

This is great. It makes sense and is a good improvement to share responsibility for facilitation across the team.

My one comment is that while it makes sense this focuses on the facilitator (as that is the big change) it may be good to clarify that the speaker(s) will remain the persons to have responded to the incident. Even being familiar with this process, it took me a second to remember how the facilitator and speaker roles differ.

[ovasdi]

The on-call edition facilitation playbook🔒 has been updated after receiving feedback.

The main changes are:

• Make facilitator and speaker roles clearer and more visible on the playbook
• Speaker tracks action items during the meeting and notes them on the postmortem
• Facilitator will assist with turning action items into tasks, if necessary
• Removed checkboxes
• Will not embed the playbook within each row of the schedule and will keep it separate, as we currently do.

[ovasdi]

Resolution

We decided to do it. 5/5 votes were 👍.

Level of Support

3: Positive feedback.

Additional Context:

Received some feedback to clarify and update the playbook as well as adjust the initially proposed changes to the process. More in this comment.

Next Steps

We will implement it.

What's been done

• New Playbook has replaced the old one
• Incident Review Schedule links to the new playbook
• Open-standup contains a bullet asking the facilitator to check the Incident Review Schedule:
  • Open-standup README has been updated with example

Outstanding items

• A slack reminder scheduled to be posted in #dev that assigns the facilitator and asks the facilitator to check the Incident Review Schedule