Incident Commander (IC)
The person responsible for all high-level coordination and decision-making during an incident.
The person responsible for all high-level coordination and decision-making during an incident.
## The Captain of the Ship The **Incident Commander (IC)** is the absolute authority during a major outage. Their job is not to fix the bug, but to **manage the response**. Think of them as an air traffic controller: they don't fly the planes, but they ensure none of them crash. ### Core Responsibilities - **Establish Command**: Announce "I am the IC" immediately upon joining. - **Assign Roles**: Designate a Scribe and Communication Lead if the incident is complex. - **Decision Making**: Make the hard calls on rollback vs. fix-forward. - **Status Updates**: Ensure the organization stays informed. ### The Golden Rule of Command > **"The IC does not touch the keyboard."** If the IC starts debugging, they lose situational awareness. Their eyes must be on the entire field, not a single log file.
ExThe Silent Incident
"A database lock caused 50% errors. 20 engineers jumped on a Zoom call and started arguing about the root cause."
Why Incident Commander Matters
Without a clear leader, decisions stall and chaos increases.
Protects the rest of the team from distractions.
Single source of truth for incident state.