Internal Liaison

So you want to be an Internal Liaison? You've come to the right place!

Purpose#

The purpose of the Internal Liaison is to be the primary individual in charge of notifying internal stakeholders of the current conditions, and informing the Incident Commander of any relevant feedback from stakeholders as the incident progresses. They are also responsible for mobilizing additional responders during an incident if requested by the incident commander.

It's important for the rest of the command staff to be able to focus on the problem at hand, rather than worrying about crafting messages to internal teams, or having to find a user's contact information in order to page them.

Your job as Internal Liaison is to listen to the call, watch the incident Slack room, and follow instructions from the IC. The Incident Commander will instruct you to notify stakeholders of the incident and keep them updated at various points throughout the call. They will also instruct you to page additional responders should it be necessary.

Prerequisites#

Before you can be an Internal Liaison, it is expected that you meet the following criteria. Don't worry if you don't meet them all yet, you can still continue with training!

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities#

Read up on our Different Roles for Incidents to see what is expected from an Internal Liaison, as well as what we expect from the other roles you'll be interacting with.

Training Process#

There is no formal training process for this role, reading this page should be sufficient for most tasks.

Incident Call Procedures and Lingo#

The Steps for Internal Liaison provide a detailed description of what you should be doing during an incident.

Here are some examples of phrases and patterns you should use during incident calls.

Keep Track of Responders#

As you listen to the call, you should keep track of the responders to the call as you hear them speak. Make a note on a piece of paper, or use the !ic responders to see who they are. The IC may ask you who is on-call for a particular system, and you should know the answer, and be able to page them.

Do we have a representative from [X] on the call?

(pause)

Hearing no response, Internal Liaison, please page the [X] on-call.

You can page them however you see fit, phone call, etc.

Mobilizing Additional Responders#

As you listen to the call, the IC may ask you to reach out to another internal team and include them in the response. Teams such as Legal, Marketing, Finance, etc may be called upon. You should be ready to page such teams as necessary.

IC: Internal Liaison, please page the Marketing team and ask them to join the call.

IL: Understood, paging Marketing team.

Provide Executive Status Updates#

Provide regular status updates on Slack (roughly every 30mins), giving an executive summary of the current status during SEV-1 incidents. Keep it short and to the point, and use @here. Mention the current state, the actions in progress, customer impact, and expected time remaining. It's OK to miss out some of those if the information isn't known.

@here: We are in SEV-1 due to X. Current actions in progress are to do Y. Expecting 3 mins to complete that action. Once action is complete, system should recover on its own within 5 minutes.