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AI for Incident Response Difficulty: Intermediate ClaudeChatGPT

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.
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