Happy 1st Birthday Howie!

Some of you might not be familiar with Howie yet, but Howie has already been helping teams around the world get started with their incident response process. Last year, Jeli introduced the industry to Howie or the “how we got here process” (“Howie” for short). Jeli developed Howie to help folks coming from all types and sizes of organizations with flexibility in mind; it’s not a script but rather a guide to incident management. The process was collaboratively developed by a number of leading experts in the field and shows the complete steps to conduct a comprehensive in-depth investigation. The guide provides concrete strategies to help you develop skills in generating insights as well as to help your company in developing an incident analysis program.

Now more than ever, learning from incidents is crucial to helping maintain service reliability requirements so companies can continue delivering on their commitments to clients and help employees stay connected and productive. We are thrilled Howie has had such an impact at so many organizations since its inception, so– Happy Birthday Howie!

After an impressive first year of making a difference for companies across the industry, we’re excited to hear what folks have been saying:

While there are plenty of great resources about specific parts of incident investigations and facilitation, the Howie guide is by far the best you can find to cover it all. It gives you a productive framing, possibly the most constructive structure to conduct your incident review, with enough details to never feel lost, but not so much that you end up feeling like you have no room to adjust your approach to your local situation. For someone who wants to get started or improve their post-incident skills, it's always my first recommendation.

Fred Herbert
Staff SRE, Honeycomb.io

Howie has been enormously helpful in our efforts to scale our LFI program at IBM. As a comprehensive and very practical framework, it has helped new facilitators rapidly become comfortable with the process of studying surprises. We love how Howie is designed to be customizable to meet the needs of different organizations, and we have created our own version of the guide that is now being used by many of our teams.

David Leigh
Distinguished Engineer, IBM

‍I often refer people to the Howie guide when they ask how to develop an effective incident analysis process for their team. Many people want a template, but Howie acknowledges that “an investigation process needs to be flexible and adaptable to the goals, interests and needs of the team or organization.” This guide is an excellent starting point to designing or improving your own incident analysis process.

Courtney Nash
Sr. Research Analyst, Verica

Get started with Howie

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