Crisis Mode (P0): Lead the System, Not the Noise

{
  "id": "ams-031",
  "title": "Crisis Mode (P0): Lead the System, Not the Noise",
  "hook": "In a real SAP P0, technical skill matters less than control of flow, attention, and decisions.",
  "idea": "Crisis handling in modern AMS is a predefined operating mode: roles switch, rules tighten, communication simplifies, and the system protects itself from chaos.",
  "sap_crisis_reality": {
    "what_usually_goes_wrong": [
      "Too many people talking, nobody deciding",
      "Engineers pulled into status reporting instead of fixing",
      "Parallel fixes without shared understanding",
      "Risky changes made under pressure with no rollback"
    ],
    "truth": "Most damage during P0 is self-inflicted."
  },
  "mode_switch": {
    "trigger_conditions": [
      "Revenue, billing, or compliance blocked",
      "Core posting failures across flows",
      "Mass interface backlog or replication failure",
      "Security breach or SoD violation with business impact"
    ],
    "automatic_changes": [
      "Freeze non-essential changes",
      "Suspend backlog grooming and planning noise",
      "Switch communication to crisis protocol"
    ]
  },
  "roles_in_crisis": [
    {
      "role": "Incident Commander",
      "responsibility": "Owns timeline, priorities, decisions, and external communication"
    },
    {
      "role": "Domain Fix Lead",
      "responsibility": "Drives diagnosis and fix within a flow (OTC, P2P, MDM, Integrations)"
    },
    {
      "role": "Stability Guardian",
      "responsibility": "Challenges risky actions, enforces rollback thinking"
    },
    {
      "role": "Comms Lead",
      "responsibility": "Translates status into business language and enforces update rhythm"
    }
  ],
  "decision_rules_under_pressure": [
    "One fix at a time per failure mode.",
    "If rollback is unclear, stop and stabilize.",
    "Prefer reversible mitigation over perfect fix.",
    "No experiments in production without containment."
  ],
  "communication_protocol": {
    "single_thread": "One crisis channel is the source of truth.",
    "update_format": [
      "What is broken (impact)",
      "What we know (facts)",
      "What we think (current hypothesis)",
      "What we do next (action + owner)",
      "Next update time"
    ],
    "cadence": [
      "P0: every 15 minutes",
      "P1: every 30 minutes"
    ]
  },
  "technical_tactics": {
    "first_30_minutes": [
      "Stop the bleeding (queues, jobs, postings)",
      "Capture evidence before it disappears",
      "Identify last known good state"
    ],
    "next_steps": [
      "Isolate blast radius",
      "Apply workaround or rollback",
      "Stabilize monitoring signals"
    ]
  },
  "after_action_rules": {
    "mandatory": [
      "Timeline reconstruction from signals, not memory",
      "Root cause hypothesis with evidence",
      "Decision review: what helped, what hurt"
    ],
    "forbidden": [
      "Blame sessions",
      "Silent closure without learning artifact"
    ]
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Maintain real-time incident timeline",
      "Detect conflicting hypotheses or duplicate work",
      "Draft clear, calm business updates",
      "Flag risky actions without rollback"
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "Crisis timeline",
      "Decision log",
      "Post-incident learning pack"
    ]
  },
  "why_this_works": [
    "Engineers stay focused on fixing, not defending.",
    "Decisions are explicit and reversible.",
    "Business sees control, not panic."
  ],
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "‘Everyone jump on the call’ reflex",
    "Fixing symptoms in parallel",
    "Over-communication without substance"
  ],
  "metrics_that_matter_in_crisis": [
    "Time to stabilize",
    "Number of concurrent fixes attempted",
    "Rollback success rate",
    "Accuracy of early impact assessment"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "If this happens again tomorrow, would we lose less time and trust?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-031.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-031.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "In a real SAP P0, technical skill matters less than control of flow, attention, and decisions."
  }
}