CMOC Practice Events
CMOC Practice Events
Support Engineering aims to conduct practice CMOC incident events globally every quarter. The exact date & time of each event (1 per region) will not be known to the CMOC ahead of time. This is to simulate the nature of live events being unexpected.
Purpose
The practice events provide an opportunity to practice the activities and processes related to the CMOC responsibility. They are not a test that can be passed or failed, but rather a team exercise to gain experience, and an opportunity to iterate on the process and documentation.
Outcomes
- Familiarity with tools like Status.io so that in a real emergency they’re not a blocker to communication
- Increased familiarity with the CMOC process and confidence in a live event
- Familiarity with the incident room, Slack #incident-management channel and how communication is formalized between Incident Manager, EOC and CMOC during the course of an incident
- An opportunity to retrospect and get live feedback from a friendly audience
Participants
- a manager or senior support engineer will fulfill the role of the Incident Manager (and EOC if appropriate) and facilitate the practice event and scenario
- a note taker (another manager or senior engineer) will take notes of any learnings, improvements or gaps in documentation or process identified during the event
- the rostered CMOC will participate as though it were a live incident (but without the pressure of an actual incident or busy incident room!)
Practice event tools, artefacts, references
- Practice event Issue template
- Practice Environment for status.io - status.io test
- Event feedback template - coordinator of quarterly event creates a new version for the quarter
- Script library - confidential to Support Managers (and SEs who may carry out the Incident Manager role for practice events)
- CMOC workflow handbook page
- Incident roles and responsibilities handbook page
How to: Create and coordinate a quarterly practice event
Assumption: a DRI has been assigned to act as the coordinator for the quarter. The following needs to be completed (or delegated for completion) by the coordinator:
- Start by creating a new practice event issue from the template
The template includes instructions of other artefacts to create and how to schedule the events.
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