Incident Analysis Fundamentals

Incident Analysis Fundamentals

This condensed training program introduces participants to the fundamentals of incident analysis.

The abridged Fundamentals workshop can be a prelude to full training and coaching, or it can make training accessible to groups with hard constraints on participant availability.

Our full Incident Analysis Training & Coaching program is designed to train a cohort of analysts within the organization. When this intensive workshop exceeds the organization’s immediate appetite, we’ve been successful in providing a condensed workshop that trains attendees in the fundamentals of incident analysis without extensive coaching in the full analysis toolkit.

What the project covers

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

Identification of critical intra-incident elements

  • How to recognize important decisions, actions, and junctures during and immediately after an incident

Brief overview of interviewing methods

Understanding context

  • How to analyze the backdrop & conditions that existed before the incident
    • What shaped the origin & handling of the event?
    • What makes the reverberations play out the way they do?
    • What does this imply for ongoing work?

The participants are experts in their own systems. In this workshop, these experts will develop skills in:

  1. Building a coherent, detailed description of the event as it unfolded;
  2. Identifying the systemic factors that produced the event and shaped the response;
  3. Recognizing novel aspects of the incident and response that reveal systems behavior and the expertise of incident responders;
  4. Producing a succinct record that synthesizes the data, analyses, and insights produced.

The Fundamentals workshop demonstrates the power of sophisticated incident analysis, without investing enough time to do the coaching necessary to meaningfully develop those skills. This can be frustrating! But the benefit of this workshop lies in the participants’ new lens on the potential of incident analysis, and in their collective ability to explore these new approaches further. This can lead to grassroots efforts to deepen the organization’s ability to sustain effective learning cycles over time, which may or may not include engaging ACL for additional coaching.

About ACL

We help you go beyond the typical template-driven “post-mortem” approach focused only on shallow incident data. We bring decades of experience in event reconstruction, systems safety research, resilience engineering, and accident investigation to the world of software engineering and operations


Scroll to Top