Assigning commanders

The Commander is the single person responsible for leading the incident response. They coordinate the team, manage stakeholder communication, and make final decisions on severity changes and resolution.

Commander responsibilities

• Triage -- assess the incident scope and impact within minutes of assignment.
• Coordinate responders -- assign the right people to investigate and fix the issue.
• Communicate -- provide regular updates to stakeholders, leadership, and affected teams.
• Escalate -- decide when to involve additional teams, vendors, or executive leadership.
• Resolve -- confirm the incident is fully addressed and move it to Resolved status.
• Debrief -- kick off the feedback and postmortem process after resolution.

Assignment methods

Manual assignment

When creating an incident, you can designate a Commander directly. To change the Commander during an active incident, any current Responder or the existing Commander can reassign the role.

1. Open the incident detail page.
2. In the Commander section, click Reassign.
3. Select the new Commander from your organization's member list.
4. The change is logged in the timeline.

Auto-assignment from on-call

If no Commander is specified at creation, Batida can automatically assign the current on-call engineer based on the incident type. Configure this behavior in your on-call escalation policies.

Round-robin assignment

For organizations that distribute incident load evenly, Batida supports round-robin Commander assignment within a team. Admins can enable this in the organization settings under incident management preferences.

Commander authority

Commanders have elevated permissions within the incident context:

Action	Commander	Responder
Resolve the incident	yes	no
Downgrade P1 severity	yes	no
Assign or reassign roles	yes	yes
Change incident status	yes	yes
Edit incident title	yes	yes
Post status updates	yes	yes

Escalation authority

The Commander has the authority to escalate incidents beyond the immediate team. This includes:

• Page additional responders -- trigger on-call escalations outside the primary team.
• Notify leadership -- send executive summaries to management for P1 and P2 incidents.
• Engage external partners -- involve vendor support teams or third-party service providers.
• Declare incident wide -- escalate to a company-wide incident that requires cross-team coordination.

Best practices

• Assign a Commander within the SLA target for your severity level.
• Choose someone with context on the affected system, even if they are not the primary fixer.
• Avoid changing Commanders mid-incident unless absolutely necessary. Each handoff introduces delay.
• After the incident, the Commander should review the feedback and initiate the postmortem.