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Technical incidents can create chaos when stakeholder notifications are not effectively managed in an organization. During an incident, internal stakeholder communications proactively provide situational awareness and transparency around its customer impact. This guide provides a framework of critical recommended practices that can be used to help you create your own process for composing and distributing internal stakeholder communications during technical incidents.

The process outlined in this document is best when used as a supplement to our Incident Response Guide, but we recommend also using it in tandem with a broader strategy around managing business incident response. This operational guide is useful for any person or team that manages internal stakeholder communications during an incident.

Prerequisites#

This guide presumes that your organization has a technical incident response plan already in place. The functions and roles described in this guide build on those already introduced when managing technical incident response. While this guide can be used independently, it is helpful to have familiarity with those concepts before proceeding.

What Is Covered?#

Definitions#

This section covers a few key concepts for clarity.

• Internal Stakeholder Communications
• The Internal Liaison

Mechanisms for internal communications#

Effective internal stakeholder communications requires actually getting your stakeholders attention. Incident update notifications can be sent over a variety of channels. This section looks at common communication channels along with their strengths and drawbacks.

• Email
• Chat Messages
• Incident Alerts
• Internal Status Page

Considerations for drafting internal communications#

Creating a comprehensive strategy for managing internal stakeholder communications requires planning before an incident to develop messaging guidelines. This section walks you through creating a plan for managing internal stakeholder communications before an incident occurs.

• Templatizing communications
• Frequency of communications

This section provides real-time considerations for stakeholder communications during an incident. Updates will vary based on where the incident is in its lifecycle. For the purposes of this document, we will focus on the phases during an incident when internal stakeholder communications are generated:

• Investigation phase
• Identification phase
• Monitoring phase
• Resolution phase

Getting your team started with stakeholder communications.#

• Next Steps

License#

This documentation is provided under the Apache License 2.0. In plain English that means you can use and modify this documentation and use it both commercially and for private use. However, you must include any original copyright notices, and the original LICENSE file.

Whether you are a PagerDuty customer or not, we want you to have the ability to use this documentation internally at your own company. You can view the source code for all of this documentation on our GitHub account, feel free to fork the repository and use it as a base for your own internal documentation.