The incident report says ninety minutes, inside the service level, closed. Ask the people who were working that morning.
When something goes wrong after go-live, two different things need restoring, and only one of them is usually measured.
Technical restoration is the service becoming available again. It is measured in minutes and reported to the steering committee.
Work restoration is the point at which people can do their work normally. It includes clearing whatever accumulated during the outage, re-entering what was recorded on paper, resolving the duplicates created by retries, and dealing with the customers who were told to call back.
It is measured in days and reported by nobody.
A ninety-minute outage can sit alongside five working days of backlog entry at unchanged targets.
The first number goes to the board and becomes the organisation’s memory of what happened. The second number is what several hundred people actually experienced, and it is what they will think of the system for the next two years.
A fallback plan without a recovery plan is not a fallback. It is a deferred backlog.
Work restoration, and why only the other number reaches the board: Built to Be Used, chapter 21.
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This article accompanies the book Built to Be Used.