Incident Commander Playbook
Define roles and steps for managing an incident.
Added October 15, 2026. Written with AI assistance and checked for clarity and placeholders; not reviewed by a lawyer, accountant, clinician or other professional. How these prompts are made
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Write an incident commander playbook for my team. Team size and on-call structure: [TEAM_STRUCTURE]. Severity levels in use: [SEVERITY_LEVELS]. Communication tools: [TOOLS]. Cover: how an incident is declared and who can declare it; roles (commander, operations lead, communications lead, scribe) with responsibilities and handoff rules; the first ten minutes as a numbered checklist; how to run the incident channel; when to escalate or call in others; update cadence by severity; decision-making rules for risky mitigations; and how to end an incident. Provide message templates for the first announcement and for handoff. Keep the document to what someone can read in 10 minutes and add a one-page quick card. Include a short training exercise with a fictional scenario. Add a section on common mistakes, such as the commander debugging instead of coordinating, no one owning communication, and changing several things at once, with the corrective behaviour for each. Include a checklist for the first ten minutes with times, and guidance for the handover when an incident crosses a shift change or lasts longer than four hours. Add a fictional training scenario written out in full so the playbook can be rehearsed: a payment service returning errors for 18 percent of requests after a configuration change at 14:05. Provide the timeline of events the facilitator reveals at minutes 0, 10, 25 and 40, the decision the commander must make at each point, and the good behaviour to look for. Add a handover script for the commander role (current state, what has been tried, what is next, open decisions, who is waiting for what), and a cheat sheet of twelve phrases a commander uses to keep control without raising their voice. Close with a monthly practice routine and a rule that anyone on the rota must have observed one incident and run one tabletop before leading a real one.
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