Running drills to boost your team's effectiveness in incident response

Why drills make incident response smarter, faster, and less stressful

Outages feel like a sprint, not a stroll. Lights go out, alarms blare, and suddenly everyone is trying to remember which button to press first. In those moments, a team that has trained together runs smoother, communicates clearer, and restores service quicker. That’s the core reason to run drills and rehearsals for incident responses. It isn’t about theatrics or ticking boxes; it’s about boosting how a team acts under pressure.

Let me explain what’s really happening when teams drill. At the heart of any incident response is a choreography: there’s an on-call person, a designated incident commander, responders who triage, and a group that handles communications and post-incident learning. When you rehearse, you’re not pretending a crisis—you're ensuring the real moment unfolds with fewer missteps. Your people know their roles, the order of operations, and how to escalate when standards aren’t met. That clarity turns chaos into coordinated action.

A clearer map for people and processes

One big win from these drills is role clarity. In the middle of a fire, who is in charge? Who communicates updates to stakeholders? Who documents what’s happening for later review? Drills force these questions to the surface and give teams concrete answers before the next outage. They also reinforce the bite-size steps that usually live in runbooks and escalation policies. When everyone can recite their lane without hesitation, the whole incident breathes easier.

Think about the typical incident workflow: sensing something is off, confirming the issue, checking the status in PagerDuty, alerting the right team, triaging the impact, containing the problem, resolving the fault, and finally performing a root-cause analysis. Each link in that chain matters. Drill sessions help people move fluidly from one link to the next—without grabbing for a manual or pausing to ask, “Wait, what do we do now?” In the best runs, decisions become almost instinctive yet thoughtfully deliberate.

Communication that doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger

Communication during a live incident can feel like a crowded room where everyone talks at once. Drills teach teams how to keep updates concise, accurate, and timely. They practice prioritizing what matters to engineers, executives, customers, and on-call teammates who might be juggling a dozen alerts at once. It’s not about sounding formal; it’s about being precise. A quick, well-timed message can save minutes of wandering in the dark.

A few practical tips show up naturally in rehearsals:

• Establish a simple “one-clear-source-of-truth” for what’s known at each moment, typically the incident timeline and status page.

• Use a consistent format for updates—what happened, the impact, what’s being done, and what to expect next.

• Designate a communications lead who handles external updates so engineers aren’t pulled away from triage every few minutes.

That calm, steady stream of information keeps fear from taking over. And when the team knows what to say—and what not to say—stakeholders feel informed, not left in the loop.

Weaknesses reveal themselves, quietly and clearly

No plan survives first contact, as the saying goes. Drills are the honest mirror that shows gaps you didn’t notice when things were “okay.” Maybe your runbooks assume a tool is always available. Or perhaps your escalation policy routes alerts to a group that’s already overwhelmed with other work. These aren’t moral failings; they’re systemic gaps waiting to be closed.

Here’s where the magic happens: those gaps can be fixed. The team learns which steps slow things down and which handoffs create friction. You can spot over-reliance on a single person, or you realize that a certain alert category floods a channel and desensitizes responders. You’ll see where documentation is stale, where checks are missing, or where you’ve built one-off processes that don’t scale. The result is a more resilient, adaptable response that doesn’t depend on heroic individual effort.

A touch of realism helps, too. Use scenarios that resemble actual incidents—like a database latency spike during peak hours or a dependency failure that starts to cascade. Bring in real-world tools you’d use in a live event—PagerDuty for on-call orchestration, Slack or Teams for updates, a status page for customers. When the drill mirrors real life, it’s not a drill at all; it’s a genuine test of the team’s readiness.

Confidence that translates to calm under pressure

When people rehearse, they build confidence. Confidence isn’t the same as arrogance; it’s the quiet belief that you can handle what comes next. In a crisis, that confidence translates into better decisions, quicker containment, and a more effective root-cause analysis after the smoke clears. You’ll notice the difference in how teams talk to each other, how they share responsibilities, and how they accept feedback without personalizing it.

A calm team is a productive team. If you’ve ever watched a group move in step through a demanding task, you know what I’m talking about: tension gives way to deliberate action, and the room feels lighter even as the clock ticks. Drills cultivate that rhythm, so when the real thing happens, your team doesn’t stumble through fear or confusion—they execute with focus.

From walls of chaos to a shared mental model

A well-run drill builds a shared mental model of how incidents unfold in your organization. That means people understand not only their own role but how their role interlocks with others. The SRE knows what the engineering team needs. The product manager understands what customers will want to know. The communications lead can draft clear external updates while the engineers resolve the issue.

This shared awareness doesn’t happen by accident. It grows from repeated, purposeful practice—where teams run through scenarios, check against a real-life timeline, and review what went well and what didn’t. The after-action discussion isn’t a blame session; it’s a constructive conversation about what can be improved and how the changes will be tested in the next round. And yes, there will be pushback and disagreements. That’s healthy, as long as the dialogue stays focused on better outcomes for users and the business.

How to design meaningful drills that actually stick

If you’re looking for a blueprint, think of a drill as a mini-incident with a clear objective. You want to test a specific aspect of your response, not re-create every possible disaster. Here’s a practical way to structure it:

• Define a single objective: e.g., test escalation speed, validate runbook accuracy, or confirm cross-team communication.

• Pick a realistic scenario: something plausible for your stack and services, with potential knock-on effects.

• Assign roles: ensure everyone knows their function in the drill—incident commander, responder, communications lead, and observers who will capture learnings.

• Set a timebox: a short window keeps energy high and the drill focused.

• Capture metrics: time to acknowledge, time to contain, decision quality, and the quality of updates.

• Debrief with honesty: what went well, what caused friction, and what to change.

• Close the loop: assign owner and a concrete timeline for implementing improvements.

In a PagerDuty-enabled environment, you can simulate alert routing, on-call shifts, and cross-channel notifications without breaking the live state of services. The goal is realistic friction, not blind repetition. When you add a deliberate constraint—like a simulated network lag or a dependent service outage—you get a better read on how your team behaves under stress.

Common pitfalls and how to dodge them

Drills fail when they feel artificial or punitive. People shut down, and you lose the honest feedback you need. Here are a few traps to watch for, along with practical fixes:

• Too rigid scripts: allow room for improvisation. Real incidents rarely follow a perfect script, and teams need space to adapt.

• Blame-heavy culture: emphasize learning, not pointing fingers. Create a safe atmosphere where contributors can voice uncertainties.

• One-and-done mentality: repeat sessions with different scenarios and updated tools. Continuous practice builds muscle over time.

• Ignoring tooling gaps: the moment a drill exposes a broken integration, fix it. Don’t let the issue linger in the “that’s a problem we’ll tackle later” pile.

• Narrow scope: broaden the exercise to cover communications, customer updates, and post-incident reviews. A comprehensive view prevents single-point fixes.

A few words about tools and real-world rigor

Many teams rely on incident management platforms like PagerDuty to coordinate responders, set escalation paths, and track response times. Drills become more authentic when you sprinkle in the actual tools people will touch during a live incident. Test alert rules, multi-team escalation chains, and the integration with chat apps or status pages. The aim is not to test the tools in isolation but to see how people use them under pressure, where bottlenecks appear, and how information travels across the organization.

The payoff is tangible: shorter outages, clearer ownership, and faster recovery. But more than that, you gain a culture that treats outages as a solvable problem rather than a terrifying ordeal. That shift matters—especially when customer trust is on the line—and it can be felt in the quiet confidence that your team brings to every outage.

A final word that wraps it up

Drills are a practical investment in readiness. They don’t just teach people what to do—they unlock how to do it together. The result is an incident response that feels less like a scramble and more like a well-rehearsed routine. When teams practice this together, they sharpen their instincts, align their actions, and find ways to recover faster and communicate more clearly.

If you’re part of a pager-based incident response setup, treat these sessions as a recurring, indispensable activity. Keep them focused, authentic, and collaborative. Bring in real-world scenarios, encourage candid feedback, and iterate with purpose. In the end, you’re not just improving an incident response—you’re strengthening the trust customers place in your service when the lights flicker and the noise grows loud.

And that, more than anything, is what makes a team truly resilient. When the next outage hits, you’ll hear the hum of coordinated effort, not the thud of chaos. That’s the sound of a team working as one.