Incident Commander Role

An incident commander — also known as an incident manager — is a IT or DevOps team member responsible for managing incident response.

The incident commander’s priority is to guide an incident to its resolution. Managing the resources, plan, and communication involved in that resolution.

An incident commander is the primary point of contact and source of truth about any incident. Without an incident commander, communication and teamwork break down.

The incident commanders must delegate tasks to their teams. And understand when to expand the team by pulling in more developers, communication experts, etc.

The incident commander should look at the big picture while developers get down in the weeds to figure out what caused the incident.

Incident commanders are responsible for escalating issues to more senior or specialized developers.

The Incident Commander handles the post-mortem. Documents where teams can share their thoughts, plan post-mortem meetings, and recommend preventing or reducing future incidents’ impact.

Incident commanders’ role is oriented toward mitigating future problems for the team.