When your organization is hit by a major incident, your ability to respond quickly and effectively can mean the difference between a brief disruption and a full-blown outage that impacts customers and revenue. If you're currently struggling with slow response times, poor communication, or inefficient processes, it's time to reassess your major incident management software and find a better solution that includes:
- Centralized orchestration and communication
- Real-time visibility and task-based tracking
- Automated runbooks and workflows
- AI functionality
- Post-incident analysis and reporting
This guide will cover the major incident response challenges organizations face and the essential features to look for in new major incident management software.
Common major incident management challenges
If any of these pain points sound familiar, your current major incident management tools may be holding you back:
- Disjointed communication between teams and stakeholders
- Lack of visibility into status and progress
- Manual, repetitive processes that slow down resolution
- Inconsistent execution of response plans and workflows
- Negative business impact and customer dissatisfaction due to prolonged downtime
- Inability to coordinate multiple teams under pressure
- Difficulty tracking and documenting incident progress
- Ineffective post-incident reviews that don’t lead to meaningful improvements
What should you look for when choosing major incident management software?
To address the challenges above, look for a solution that offers:
1. Centralized orchestration and communication
One of the biggest challenges that Major Incident Managers face is having to pivot between different tools during an incident response, costing valuable time and creating greater stress and risk. Having a centralized solution that unifies these tools, for example by integrating with your ITSM, avoids the need to constantly switch between them and will make incident response faster, more efficient, and more effective.
Another challenge is that communications and the actions that need to be taken are often only captured in chat functions - using a centralized platform to turn these chats into tasks that live in one place with unified communications will create greater visibility and collaboration during and after the event.
2. Real-time visibility and task-based tracking
Keeping track of what’s happening during the chaos of an incident can be challenging without the right visibility functionality in your major incident management software. Choose a platform that provides a live view of both upcoming and completed activities during the incident, so that Major Incident Managers, responders, and stakeholders all have a full understanding of progress. Dashboards and a live activity feed help teams stay aligned and make informed decisions quickly.
3. Automated runbooks and workflows
Taking your incident management tasks out of disparate communications such as chat functions and instead having the ability to turn these into task-driven runbook plans is a key maturity step for improving your response times, so look out for automated runbook solutions that enable this.
Although every incident is different and requires a unique response, there are certain actions or workflows that will be helpful across multiple scenarios, for example, the actions taken to kick off a response after an incident occurs. A good major incident management tool should support the automation of repetitive workflows and provide customizable playbooks to ensure consistent response across incidents.
4. AI insights and suggestions
AI can help improve your incident response in a number of ways. Generative AI is useful for creating new plans from scratch in a matter of seconds, as well as offering intelligent improvements to existing plans to make them more efficient. AI agents can also be used to perform certain workflows, taking extra work off your plate, but it’s important to have a space where you can oversee this work and have full visibility of what your AI agents are doing.
5. Post-incident analysis and reporting
Part of continuous improvement is having accurate data from previous responses to draw from. Look for major incident management software with built-in analytics and reporting to make it easy to identify improvement opportunities and share insights across the organization. These features are also vital for reducing the burden associated with accurate and timely regulatory reporting.
The advantages of using the right major incident management tool
Choosing the right major incident management software is about empowering your teams to respond with speed, precision, and confidence. By prioritizing features like automation, centralized collaboration, and visibility, you’ll be better equipped to reduce downtime, protect your business, and continuously improve in the following ways:
Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
An effective tool accelerates recovery by eliminating manual processes and facilitating faster execution.
Improve communication and collaboration
Centralized tools unify teams and stakeholders, ensuring everyone is working from the same real-time information.
Enhance visibility and control
Real-time dashboards provide a clear view of incident progress, enabling leaders to make informed decisions quickly.
Increase efficiency and productivity
Automating repetitive tasks allows response teams to focus their efforts on core resolution activities.
Improve post-incident analysis and learning
Built-in reporting features provide the accurate data needed to identify root causes and drive continuous improvement.
Reduce business impact
By minimizing downtime and accelerating resolution, the financial and operational risks of a major incident are lowered.
Improve customer satisfaction
Faster and more consistent incident resolution directly translates to a better experience for customers affected by service disruptions.
Case study: Multinational finance corporation transforms major incident management
A financial services company faced challenges in managing major incidents due to a lack of centralized tools and inefficient communication between teams. The existing platform, ServiceNow, was insufficient, requiring Major Incident Managers to use multiple tools, which led to siloed information, slow resolution times, and inconsistent updates. This fragmented approach created difficulties in tracking incidents, managing tasks, and conducting post-incident reviews, ultimately affecting scalability and operational efficiency.
To address these issues, the company adopted Cutover Respond across multiple lines of business. The platform integrates with ServiceNow, which remains the tool for triggering incidents and the ultimate source of truth, while Cutover Respond provides a central platform for orchestration and communication. This automation and streamlined process has significantly improved collaboration, reducing the time spent on status reporting and increasing overall visibility for stakeholders, and removing the need for incident managers to constantly switch between multiple tools.
The implementation of Cutover Respond has resulted in measurable improvements in incident management. With hundreds of incidents managed and thousands of monthly users, the company can now track key metrics like mean time to mitigation and mean time to resolution directly in ServiceNow. The centralized platform enhances communication and decision making, leading to quicker resolutions and more scalable operations as the solution expands across additional business units.
Why you should choose Cutover Respond for major incident management
When choosing the right automated incident management system, consider Cutover Respond for reducing incident recovery times with action-driven collaboration, coordination, and visibility. Respond provides AI-powered automated runbooks for incident management, enabling teams to:
Adopt a task-led approach
- Turn disconnected incident response management activities into a clear list of tasks for assigned users to execute during an incident. Gain full transparency into execution activities, with clear accountability and continuous improvement, while removing the administrative burden on those managing the incident. Get full visibility of critical time management tasks, removing the need to track the data for when each task is running to or over its due date.
Easily access stored response patterns
- Bring pre-planned recovery workflows into an incident runbook, reducing major incident recovery execution time. Create reusable snippets to easily access repeatable incident task flows and insert them into Cutover runbooks. Remove the need for muscle memory, enhancing the accuracy of execution.
Integrate the tools you already use
- Integrate with the systems you already use, such as your IT service management platform, to surface data in a collaborative view within your execution platform. Have access to the contextual information that is vital to the success of your major incident response management in one view, rather than spread across multiple platforms. Remain compliant by instantly writing back data to your source of truth tool.
Collaborate with visibility and transparency
- Get real-time visibility into the status of the incident and see on-going activities and updates in one place. Quick access to paging systems enables you to communicate with and engage teams. See all surface incident data in one view, including the severity, DDMR (detected, diagnosed, mitigated, and resolved) dates and times, active participation, affected configuration items, executive summary, business impact, and latest updates.
See an accurate view of all activity
- View a live stream of events via the activity feed, which is filterable to help you get to the information you need instantly. Improve visibility during an event and make post-event reporting simple.
Use AI features and agents to increase productivity
Generate runbooks in minutes, get intelligent suggestions for runbook improvement, and generate runbooks summaries with Cutover AI Create, Improve and Summarize. Integrate AI agents with your runbooks that can perform workflows independently with the added advantage of human oversight.
The Cutover platform enables enterprises to simplify complexity, streamline work, and increase visibility. Cutover’s AI-powered automated runbooks connect teams and technology, increasing efficiency and reducing risk in major incident management. Cutover is trusted by world-leading institutions, including the three largest US banks and three of the world’s five largest investment banks.
Find out more about Cutover Respond here or book a demo to see it in action today.
