Without a program to support them, incident management processes wither

Why we picked it · the editor's summary

Chapman's distinction is between a process, the documented procedure, and a programme, the organisational structure that keeps it alive, and his estimate from experience is that a process runs on momentum for about six months before the missing steward shows. The fire service is his counterexample: it keeps training officers whose job is the capability itself. Without a named owner, staff turnover, growth, and tooling changes outrun the maintenance, and the erosion is silent until the failure. His recommendation is one accountable person at a small company, with the institutional backing to do the job, and a test you can run today: who is answerable for whether the training is current, the rotations staffed, and the severity levels still matching the product. We asked; it took a while to get a name.