Hacks, Tips & Tricks

For Better Playbook Creation

Keeping the following tips in mind will help you improve your incident response processes.

Group your strategies

Coming up with all the actions needed to be taken by every responder can be confusing. Groups are an easy way to organize your strategies.

Our best tip is to take a blank sheet, draw all the actions that should be taken by a specific team, and replicate your drawing into Cobalt, using Groups. And, repeat this process for your other team. Then, inject those playbooks into the parent playbook, using Flow. We suggest that you start with less (3-5 groups), and add progressively.

Keep it simple

Your main goal is to solve the incident as fast as possible. Go straight to the point to make it easy for your responders to understand their tasks quickly.

Take advantage of team roles

Nothing ensures you that the employees you have today will remain the same in a few months. Cobalt lets you plan for these undesirable situations by providing team roles.

Define team roles into Cobalt (ex. captain, coordinator, etc.) and assign tasks to those roles, instead of a specific person. This will prevent you from changing your strategies every time you lose an employee.

Be specific

When writing the tasks into Cobalt, be specific. A crisis can place enormous stress on an individual, so the more specific you are, the less likely you’ll get errors related to human factors. 

Forget about the system

We recommend you not to think about the system yet, but rather to think that the incident could be triggered by an employee. Starting with that in mind, it will be easier to create your workflow.