The Incident Lunch Exercise

Incldent Lunch exercise template This is a template that can be used to run an incident lunch exercise. This version was adopted from an exercise that runs regularly at Slack.

Setup and plan the lunch exercise

1. Invite folks, make a calendar invite
2. Reserve a conference room
3. Find a volunteer who can be in the Incident Commander role, this is often someone who has taken the exercise before and wants to level up their skills while keeping the exercise surprise
4. Check that our slides are up to date with any incident process updates
   1. If you are in a new location you may add a map slide with the lunch exclusion zone

Facilitating the exercise

1. Run through the training introduction
   1. Give some background on IMS and/or Incident Response - the basics of why we are doing this?
   2. Walk through some of the common roles in your Incident Response process
   3. Talk through how an incident starts at your company
   4. What is the main goal of your incident response process?
      1. At most places it is to restore service as quickly as possible - say this part out loud
   5. Give some tips and tricks commonly used in incident response
      1. be clear and concise
      2. develop multiple plans
      3. use time boxing to keep things moving
      4. focus on roles not individuals
2. Once you've introduced those basics it's time to spring the surprise on them.
   1. Lunch has fallen through. The front desk notified us that the bike messenger delivering lunch ended up on the other side of town.
   2. Now they must come together as an incident response team and get lunch delivered as quickly as possible - hopefully before the 2 hours is up
3. Set the ground rules / constraints
   1. order must be made outside the lunch exclusion zone, to avoid making things too easy- no running to the Subway across the street
   2. they can pick up or order in (but, delivery timing is often unpredictable)
   3. set a per person budget limit (approx $25 USD/person is a good spot)
   4. lunch is expensed, keep receipts (someone has to submit an expense report)
   5. they can use whatever resources at hand - laptops, phones, slack, zoom, etc
   6. anyone with real dietary restrictions must be accommodated (and the chaos cards simulate some dietary restrictions, as well)
4. Have the group pick an Incident Commander (we recommend planting this person if you can); for groups entirely made of people new to the process, often the facilitator acts as Incident Commander.
5. Hand it over and start your timer for chaos cards
   1. Have someone from the group (or the facilitator) pick a chaos card every 5 minutes, if they're doing a great job you can speed them up, if the group is struggling you can slow them down a little bit (remember this should still be fun!)
6. Once lunch is delivered, run a quick retrospective while you eat lunch. The facilitator should share some things they noticed but lean into the group to see what insights they had during the exercise.
7. Clean up the conference room and you're all done!