Playbook Creation 101

You already know What You Need To Do Before Creating Your Playbooks. Now, it’s time for the fun part!

Whether it’s for a minor incident, such as small equipment failure, or a major incident, like a fire; an effective incident response strategy is key to enhance your productivity. Cobalt makes it easy for you to design effective playbooks, in order to automate your response plans, empowering your team with efficiency.

To make the process easier, here’s 3 easy steps to develop your incident response playbooks.  

Who are the responders?

When designing your playbook, you need to focus on collaboration, mobilization, and communication.  We suggest putting together a list of all responders, and divide them into groups. 

Think about all the individuals that will play a role in solving the incident. Then, give those responders a specific role (captain, coordinator, etc.). It is your employees that will take action and make things right, so prepare them to do whatever is in their power to minimize impacts. 

Which actions must be taken?

Think about the actions required from each of them to solve the incident quickly. Identify the actions that should be taken by each group. A good practice is put yourself in the responders’ position.

Here’s an example of the elements you can consider:

  • Create a backstory: Where does the issue come from? See Improve Situation Awareness to learn more about how to define the situation.
  • List all possible affected stakeholders: Which of your employees or divisions would be affected? Would customers be affected? What about partners? And providers?
  • Think about the event location: In which facility, or office this incident is more likely to happen? On which floor? Is the management team likely to be there?
  • Think about the time of the event: Is the incident more likely to occur during business hours?

We suggest you start with the main actions, then, go deeper providing detailed information to your responder. You want your teams to be armed with the right knowledge to react quickly, and properly. Cobalt will send them their assigned tasks as the incident unfolds.

What is the sequence?

During an incident, your response in the first few hours determines your success. One way to make sure your team reacts as required in a timely fashion is to create a linear sequence to structure the actions.