Interim Technology Director — Incident Command Readiness

Command must work before the incident arrives

Review how incidents are declared, who assumes command and how technical evidence is assembled. Identify competing communication channels, ambiguous escalation triggers and decisions that currently wait for an individual who may not be available. Establish a command structure that remains proportionate to the incident and can expand without losing clarity.

Exercise judgement while evidence changes

Design exercises around uncertain and changing evidence. Require teams to identify the operational impact, distinguish established facts from hypotheses and select the next action with an explicit owner. Test handovers between shifts and the management of simultaneous technical workstreams.

Work with operational leaders to define which restoration actions need their approval and what information they require. Establish a decision log that is useful during the incident rather than an administrative reconstruction afterwards. Ensure supplier participation, executive briefings and customer communications receive consistent information through agreed routes.

Embed the learning in ordinary delivery

Own the implementation of improved incident routines, training and exercise follow-through. Establish reviews that examine decision quality and system weaknesses without reducing learning to the identification of an individual error. Track corrective actions into delivery governance so that repeated incidents are not treated as unrelated events.

The director leads technology incident readiness; designated operational authorities retain control of physical service decisions. Handover should include trained command roles, exercised escalation arrangements and a maintained improvement backlog. Success means teams can establish control quickly, make traceable decisions and sustain a coherent response when the incident does not match a familiar runbook.

Incident leadership candidates should demonstrate

Candidates need senior technology operations or service management experience in high-availability environments. They should have led or materially improved major-incident response and be able to explain how command discipline affected restoration decisions. A background confined to incident process documentation is insufficient.

Discuss a situation in which the initially favoured diagnosis proved wrong. The assessment will explore how you changed direction, maintained trust and prevented teams from continuing conflicting actions. Calm communication, technical curiosity and a willingness to make uncertainty explicit are central to this role.