The Negotiability of “Severity” Levels

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As we study different organizations across the industry, we’ve asked people questions about what “severity levels” mean to them, including:

The conclusion that we’ve come to is that the term “severity” has many different meanings and purposes (in the same way post-incident reviews are) when it is used to categorize incidents. For example, here is how I defined severity levels at Etsy many years ago (I can imagine that these may have changed since I left):

More often than not, “severity level” is given as a way of categorizing the impact an incident has had on the customers of the business. In some cases, the concept of severity level is used by people responding to an incident as a way to describe their current assessment of the event to relay to others.

Source: www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com