Incident Analysis Workshop
September 9-13, 2019
New York, NY
UPDATE: We are at capacity for this event!
About the Workshop
What is it?
5 day workshop on practical incident investigation and analysis in modern software organizations.
For whom?
Practitioners in software-centered companies with substantial experience coping with incidents and their aftermath in medium to large size enterprises. 16 minimum/24 maximum)
When is it?
September 9-13, 2019
Where is it?
New York, NY, USA
Cost
$6000 USD per seat (20% off for 2nd and 3rd seat from same company)
What to expect
- This is a demanding and intensive case-based experience aimed at building critical thinking skills in a collaborative setting. The interaction between peers is a key component of the workshop.
- The workshop will have at most 24 participants. This allows for both productive group work and individual attention.
- There will be some preparatory reading sent in advance.
- Each day begins at 9AM and ends at 5PM.
- Light breakfast will be served beginning at 8:30AM, and lunch will be provided.
Topics and Themes
Debriefing and interviewing methods and techniques
How to plan and carry out interviews with key actors
Identification of critical intra-incident elements
How to recognize important decisions, actions, and junctures during and immediately after an incident
Event reconstruction
How to identify, collect, assess, and collate the data relevant to the incident
- Approach to iterative incident reconstruction
- Identifying data sources
- Analyzing incident response chat and audio transcriptions
Theme extraction and narrative composition
How to identify and capture the issues that drove attention and action
Understanding context
How to analyze the backdrop & conditions that existed before the incident
- What shaped the origin & handling of the event?
- Why do the reverberations play out the way they do?
- What does this imply for ongoing work?
Group debriefing and dialogue facilitation
How to prepare presentation materials to encourage exploration and generative discussion by others
- What makes a good presentation?
- Guiding discussions that go astray.
- Naming elephants in the room.
Recognizing and managing organizational tensions
How to respond to strong reactions.
Incidents can evoke strong responses and even bad behavior that makes useful incident analysis difficult.
Who should attend
This workshop was developed for experienced practitioners in software-centered organizations who have had experience with responding to production incidents and have participated in post-incident review of some form or another, and look to build the foundational skills necessary to get the most value from incidents.
We encourage companies to send two or even three people to participate in the workshop.
Our experience tells us that having a similarly trained, similarly motivated partner to work with substantially improves the quality and efficiency of incident analysis. We strongly recommend that you arrange to attend the workshop with one or two colleagues form your firm.
The second and third attendees from a company receive a 20% discount.
Workshop Leaders
The leaders of this workshop have been studying complex systems failure, Cognitive Systems Engineering, and Resilience Engineering in software-centered organizations for a decade. They bring methods, approaches, and techniques for accident investigation and event reconstruction from the worlds of Systems Safety and Human Factors.