Few things damage productivity as much as waiting. The act of waiting forces us to context switch, disrupts our creative momentum, and eliminates our ability to experiment. Whether we are deploying a new service or troubleshooting a problem, waiting puts a heavy tax on team productivity in IT Operations.

Believe it or not, there is a difference between incident closure and incident resolution. Incident closure ensures a problem has been addressed. Comparatively, incident resolution goes a step further by ensuring an incident is closed and all stakeholders are satisfied with the end results and agree with the incident closure.

The other day, a newer Engineering Manager here at PagerDuty, Dileshni Jayasinghe, started a Slack thread expressing joy at how fantastic our engineering team is after attending a conference with engineering folk from other organizations. She explained that she’d shared our practice of owning what we build with someone—who then responded by gazing off into the distance and saying, “That’s my dream.”