Improving Incident Response Through Cross-Functional Collaboration

When you experience an outage, it’s not just an engineering problem. Your client relationships and the trust they place in your brand are also at stake—not to mention potential legal consequences and financial impact. That’s why many SRE teams are designing their response processes with cross-functional collaboration in mind.

Benefits of Cross-Functional Collaboration in Incident Response

Reduced Response Times

Imagine your responder is handling an issue over the weekend that affects important customers. To troubleshoot, the on-call engineer needs access to certain customer details, each requiring consent. However, the responder is delayed until someone from customer service can contact the customers, and legal can clarify the procedure.

This response delay can be reduced by establishing a proactive plan that forms a cross-functional response team as needed. When everyone is involved from the start, responders can act more confidently and avoid bottlenecks. A collaborative approach ensures the right people handle their areas of expertise, reducing resolution time.

Improved Communication

When responders encounter a problem that requires approval or action from another department, it’s like hitting a wall. Because these teams don’t typically interact, there’s no established communication channel, leading to misalignment and delays.

An incident response playbook that includes roles from different functions helps establish communication paths and fosters collaboration early on. This active cooperation improves communication and breaks down interdepartmental barriers.

Better Customer Experience

No one likes incidents, especially affected customers or partners. Even when a third-party issue or an external factor is the cause, your organization is held responsible for the degraded experience. During these tense moments, staying engaged with customers can reinforce their trust in your brand by showing you care.

To accomplish this, you need to communicate actively and work closely with customers to mitigate the incident’s impact. Involving customer support or customer success teams when an incident affects clients ensures they’re ready to handle surges in requests and keep everyone informed.

Common Challenges in Cross-Functional Incident Management

Siloed Communication

Organizational silos are often proportional to company size. In a large firm, each function can be as big and complex as a small business. To counteract the silo effect, you need to develop relationships with key stakeholders across various teams.

Though this requires navigating some bureaucracy and office politics, the effort pays off. You gain a better understanding of how other teams operate and how best to collaborate during an incident, allowing information to flow more freely and enabling quicker resolutions.

Tool Fragmentation

Each function uses the tools that suit it best—PR might rely on Asana, while customer success leans on Salesforce. This diversity of tools can create barriers to collaboration during an incident.

Integrate these tools by connecting them through your incident response management platform. For example, Rootly offers over 70 integrations, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly across the tools they’re already using.

Conflicting Priorities

While your team may be focused on meeting specific SLOs, these targets may mean little to the legal representative or PR official assisting with an incident. Similarly, understanding complex privacy laws across the regions your organization serves may be outside your scope.

Show empathy when working with other teams. Communicate in terms they can understand, map out how the incident affects their objectives, and clarify how they can help effectively.

How to Foster Effective Cross-Functional Collaboration

Unified Communication Platforms

Despite functional differences, most organizations have a central communication platform, like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Leverage this tool to coordinate your incident response process. Platforms like Rootly include Slack integrations that let your team triage, coordinate, and resolve incidents directly in Slack.

Using a unified communication platform ensures everyone is onboarded. You can easily invite Jan from Legal to an incident channel, or Clara from PR to update status pages without requiring new tools.

Defined Roles and Responsibilities

Each incident is a unique challenge, but certain elements recur regardless of its specifics. Establishing defined roles within your incident response team builds predictability into the process and strengthens reliability.

It’s essential to not only assign roles like CS lead or PR lead in your incident response playbook but to outline the specific responsibilities of each. This clarity enables responders to work confidently within their objectives without duplicating efforts.

Regular Training and Drills

Since most functions operate independently day-to-day, expecting them to work seamlessly together during a high-severity incident can be challenging. Regular training on each department’s expected response role is advisable.

However, training alone isn’t enough. Simulated drills help teams test cross-functional collaboration in practice. They reveal which processes work well and which require adjustment or clarification.

Frequent Status Updates

Effective collaboration depends on rapid information flow. Ensure that anyone who needs updates about an incident can access them without having to ask. This might mean adopting an internal status page or keeping incident summaries updated in real-time.

Another option is Rootly AI, which allows anyone in your Slack organization to request an incident summary from the AI. For instance, a new participant can ask “@rootly what’s going on?” and receive a comprehensive update.

Automation of Routine Tasks

As more people and tools get involved, the complexity of processes increases. Prevent response teams from becoming bogged down by managing tools by automating tasks where it makes sense. For example, configure your incident response tool to automatically create a Jira project for incident-related tasks directly from Slack.

You can automate various steps of the incident resolution process, from alerts to post-incident retrospectives. Automation is a key feature in most incident response tools, so explore what options your solution offers.

Create a Stronger Incident Response Strategy With Rootly

Unlike legacy tools, Rootly is user-friendly and designed for cross-functional collaboration. Rootly offers native Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations.

You’ll benefit from automated incident channels loaded with all the tools your cross-functional response team needs: a dedicated Zoom meeting, a Linear board, and relevant playbooks.

Rootly also helps automate stakeholder communications and schedule reminders for tasks like status page updates. Book a demo with one of our reliability experts to discover how Rootly can help you resolve incidents faster with a cross-functional team.

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