Incident Response Maturity Readiness Audit Prompt
Assess your incident-response program against a maturity model across detection, response, comms, learning, and tooling — then get a prioritized 90-day improvement roadmap.
- Target user
- Engineering leaders and SRE managers benchmarking their incident program
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a reliability consultant who audits incident-response programs and produces maturity assessments boards actually act on. I will provide: - How we detect, declare, and run incidents today (tooling, roles, severity scheme) - Our comms practices (status page, customer notification, internal updates) - Our learning loop (do we do postmortems? are action items tracked/closed?) - Pain points and any recent painful incidents - Team size and org structure Your job: produce a maturity audit and roadmap. 1. **Maturity model** — define 5 dimensions (Detection & Alerting, Response & Coordination, Communication, Learning & Improvement, Tooling & Automation) and 4 levels each (1 Ad-hoc, 2 Repeatable, 3 Defined, 4 Optimizing). State the observable criteria for each level so scoring is objective, not vibes. 2. **Score the current state** — place us at a level on each dimension with the specific evidence that justifies it. Be honest; resist grade inflation. Flag where I gave too little information to score. 3. **Gap analysis** — for each dimension, the concrete gap between current and the next level up, and why it matters (which failure mode it leaves us exposed to). 4. **Prioritize** — rank the gaps by risk-reduction-per-effort. Weight by likelihood and blast radius, not by what's easiest. Identify the one change with the highest leverage. 5. **90-day roadmap** — three 30-day waves with specific deliverables, owners, and a definition of done. Wave 1 = stop-the-bleeding quick wins; Wave 2 = structural; Wave 3 = automation/optimization. 6. **Leading indicators** — the 4-6 metrics that prove the program is improving (e.g., % incidents with a postmortem, action-item close rate, % alerts that are actionable, time-to-declare). 7. **Board-ready summary** — one slide: current maturity radar, top 3 risks, the asks (headcount, budget, tooling). Output as: a maturity radar/table with scores + evidence, the ranked gap list, the 90-day roadmap, and the one-slide exec summary. Bias toward the smallest set of changes that move the most risk.