Extra Crispy: Your Incident Process Is Burning Out Your Engineers
Many incident processes optimize for compliance, not humans. This talk explores how blending DevOps principles with modern ITIL practices can reduce burnout, improve recovery, and create healthier engineering cultures.
At 2:13 AM, nobody cares whether your incident process is technically compliant.
They care whether people know what to do, whether communication is clear, and whether the same exhausted engineer has become the single point of failure for your entire company.
For years, many organizations treated ITIL and DevOps as enemies: one focused on control, the other on speed. But after working with engineering and operations teams across multiple environments, I discovered the real problem wasn’t process, it was designing systems that ignored the humans inside them.
In this talk, I’ll share real-world lessons from teams struggling with alert fatigue, endless escalations, hero culture, and burnout disguised as “ownership.” We’ll explore how modern ITIL concepts like continual improvement, incident management, and value streams can actually support DevOps practices when implemented with empathy instead of bureaucracy.
Attendees will learn:
- Why “hero culture” silently destroys operational resilience
- How poorly designed escalation paths increase burnout
- What psychologically safe incident response actually looks like
- Where ITIL still provides value in modern DevOps organizations
- Practical ways to reduce operational stress without sacrificing reliability
As PassionIT Group’s Director of Training, Chris Ward brings a diverse background of IT and Project Management work for over 30 years. From broadcasting operations to training development, Chris has participated in million-dollar projects to small installs at a local health care provider. He has held numerous CompTIA, Microsoft and Cisco certifications in the past and currently holds the ITIL 4 and (version 5) Master, ITIL-Expert (v3), PMP, PMI-ACP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, CRISC, CISA, PSM, DevOps. His passion is to help people learn, to have "light bulb moments", and to continue their careers in IT Service Management and Project Management. From development to delivery, Chris has worked with some of the top eLearning companies in the world as well as Cisco and VMWare.
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