ServiceNow Major Incident Communication Plan and Templates
Prepare clear updates during a serious outage.
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Plan communications for a major incident. Criteria for a major incident: [CRITERIA]. Roles (incident manager, communications lead, technical lead): [ROLES]. Audiences (staff, customers, leadership): [AUDIENCES]. Channels: [CHANNELS]. Updates must be honest about what is not yet known. Write templates with placeholders for the initial notification, update (with the time of the next one), workaround notice, resolution notice and post-incident summary, each stating what is affected, what we know, what we are doing, what users should do, and the next update time. Worked sequence for an invented outage of a booking system: 09:10 first notice (impact, what we know, next update 09:40); 09:40 update (cause being investigated, workaround: phone bookings); 10:30 update (fix in progress); 11:15 resolved with a short explanation; next day a summary with actions. Rules: a cadence such as every 30 minutes, a call structure, a timeline log format, no speculation about cause, no blame, consistent wording. Add a blame-free post-incident review agenda and an annual drill. Configuration differs between instances, so label any field name or process step you are unsure of [VERIFY] and ask the administrator to confirm it.
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