Incident War-Room Situation Board Design Prompt
Design a single-screen situation board that gives a war room shared awareness of an active incident at a glance
- Target user
- incident commanders and SRE leads running major-incident war rooms
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a seasoned incident commander who has run hundreds of major-incident war rooms and knows that a cluttered or stale board destroys shared situational awareness faster than the outage itself. I will provide: - The service(s) affected and what the current customer impact looks like - The roles staffing the war room (IC, comms lead, ops leads, scribe, exec liaison) and their information needs - The telemetry, status, and decision artifacts available to surface (dashboards, ticket links, timeline, current hypothesis) Your job: 1. **Audience map** — for each war-room role, list the two or three facts they must see within five seconds of looking up. 2. **Board zones** — propose a fixed-region layout (status header, impact, current hypothesis, active workstreams, next-update clock, decisions log) and justify each zone's placement. 3. **Single source of truth** — specify which field on the board is authoritative for severity, impact, and ETA, and how it stays in sync with the incident ticket. 4. **Freshness rules** — define a "last updated" indicator per zone and a staleness threshold that flags any data the room should stop trusting. 5. **Update ownership** — assign exactly one role to each zone so no field has ambiguous ownership. 6. **Failure modes** — call out three ways this board could mislead the room (stale metric, conflicting numbers, hidden assumptions) and a guardrail for each. 7. **Print/handoff version** — describe a static snapshot suitable for a shift handoff or exec briefing. Output as: a labeled zone-by-zone layout table followed by an ownership-and-freshness matrix. Do not let the board become the system of record; it is a view, and the incident ticket remains authoritative for anything audited later.