# Operational Incident Response

> A calm, sequenced response to an operational incident that contains impact first, communicates clearly, and learns afterward.

**Category:** Operations

**When to use:** When a delivery, service, or process failure is affecting customers or the team.

**Trigger:** An operational incident is detected

## Steps

1. Declare the incident and name a single incident lead.
2. Assess and state the impact: who is affected and how badly.
3. Contain first; stop the bleeding before chasing root cause.
4. Communicate status on a fixed cadence to affected parties, even when there is no new news.
5. Resolve, confirm the fix holds, and stand the incident down.
6. Run a blameless review within 48 hours and convert lessons into preventive actions with owners.

## Outputs

- An incident timeline
- Status communications sent on cadence
- A blameless review with preventive actions

## Tools

- Incident channel
- Status page or email
- Postmortem doc

## Notes

Communicate on cadence even when there is nothing new. Silence during an incident reads as loss of control.

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Free SOP from the OrgTP Process Library — https://orgtp.com/process-templates/operational-incident-response
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