Milestone

A milestone is a significant event or stage within an incident response process. Milestones describe the active state of an incident and communicate to stakeholders the team's progress in resolving the issue.

What is a milestone?

Milestones highlight notable points of progress or achievement in resolving an incident. They indicate how the incident response is progressing and help teams track their efforts toward incident resolution. Milestones are often paired with phases. Phases can most simply describe the before, during, and after an incident, while milestones are more specific events. 

Why are milestones important?

Milestones play a crucial role in incident management for several reasons:

1. They provide visibility into the overall progress of incident response, allowing stakeholders to assess the current status and make informed decisions.

2. Milestones enable effective communication and coordination among response teams, aligning everyone on the incident's status and next steps.

3. Milestones serve as a reference point for retrospective analysis, helping teams identify areas for improvement and learn from past incidents.

4. Milestones can help you calculate cycle time, an essential metric for zeroing in on issues with your incident management process.

Milestone examples

Defining milestones in advance and communicating them to the incident response team is essential to ensure consistency and shared understanding.

We use the below phases and milestones in our incident response framework at FireHydrant. Each incident moves through these phases and milestones in the same order every time: 

Declare 

• Impact started: The affected system began having problems. 

• Detected: A monitoring system or human noticed the system was having problems.

• Acknowledged: The person responsible for responding to incidents within the affected system acknowledged the monitoring system's page.

• Declared: The incident management process began.

Respond 

• Investigating: The first concrete step toward identifying a fix or remediating the problems with the affected system occurred.

• Identified: The issue was understood, and work to mitigate the problem began.

• Mitigated: The system stopped exhibiting customer-impacting issues and a solution was introduced (Note: that solution may or may not be durable; additional engineering work may be required to resolve the issue.).

Resolve 

• Resolved: The issue stopped impacting customers and the solution was durable.

• Retrospective preparation: Team began preparing and gathering additional data about the incident

• Retrospective completed: Retrospective document completed, any additional follow-on retrospectives or other meetings are done, and any follow-up items were identified. 

Automating the process of declaring milestones

Automation enhances the processes related to declaring incident milestones, and incident management platforms (like ours) provide features that automate the declaration and tracking of milestones. 

By leveraging automation, incident responders can:

• streamline the milestone declaration process, 

• reduce manual effort, 

• and accurately track key incident stages. 

Automation enables real-time updates with centralized visibility and facilitates reports and metrics, making monitoring and managing an incident's progress easier.