The Analog Incident Kitchen Cart: A War Room on Wheels

When a major incident hits, many teams still reach for the same pattern: “Where’s the war room?” You round everyone up, cram into a conference room, crowd around a big screen, and hope you can stay on top of the chaos.

But what if you don’t have a dedicated war room? What if you’re in a shared office, a hot-desking setup, or a hybrid environment where a permanent incident space is impossible?

Enter the analog incident kitchen cart: a small, rolling “paper command center” that brings the war room to your people instead of summoning your people to the war room.

In this post, we’ll explore how a mobile, analog setup can:

• Replace (or supplement) a traditional war room when space is limited
• Slow people down just enough to think clearly
• Make stressful work feel more human and collaborative
• Combine beautifully with digital incident tools like xMatters

Why a Rolling Cart Instead of a War Room?

The space problem

Many teams simply don’t have an always-available dedicated war room:

• Conference rooms are oversubscribed
• Teams are distributed or on rotating desk assignments
• Different groups share the same office floors

Blocking out a room for hours (or days) during a critical incident can be politically and logistically expensive. And if half your experts are at different desks—or even different floors—you end up with a constant disconnect between “where the work is happening” and “where the context is visible.”

Bring the room to the work

A rolling paper command center flips the model:

• Instead of pushing everyone into a single space
• You roll the incident context to where the relevant people already are

Think of it as a war room on wheels:

• A compact cart, like a kitchen island or AV trolley
• Loaded with analog tools and printed context
• Easy to move between pods of desks or team spaces

You’re not just moving paper—you’re moving shared understanding around the office.

What Goes on an Incident Kitchen Cart?

You don’t need anything fancy. Start with a small, sturdy cart that can be easily rolled and parked near a group of desks. Then stock it with:

1. Visual context surfaces

• Magnetic whiteboard or foam board
  • For drawing time-lines, architectures, and blast radius diagrams
  • For writing the current incident status, key decisions, and next checkpoints
• Clipboards or pinboards
  • To attach printed dashboards, key metrics, or status summaries updated every 10–15 minutes

2. Analog tools

• Notepads and index cards for scratch work and quick lists
• Sticky notes for tracking hypotheses, observations, and action items
• Colored markers and highlighters to visually distinguish:
  • Symptoms vs. causes
  • Confirmed facts vs. assumptions
  • Customer-facing impacts vs. internal issues

3. Printed context from digital tools

Even in an analog setup, your digital systems remain the source of truth. The cart simply gives them a physical, shared face:

• Printed incident timelines from tools like xMatters
• Current service health snapshots and key metrics
• Runbooks or checklists for common incident types
• Contact trees or “who’s on point for what” rosters

Update and reprint these periodically during the incident. The ritual of printing and pinning them to the board is itself a moment to pause, verify, and clarify.

4. Human comfort items (optional but powerful)

• A small timer (for check-in cadences)
• Healthy snacks or bottled water
• A simple sign: “Incident Cart – Please Don’t Move Without Owner”

These small touches reinforce that this cart is a temporary, intentional, human-centered space—not just office clutter.

The Power of Analog in a Digital Incident World

We’re deep in the age of automation, observability, and digital dashboards. So why bother with paper, whiteboards, and sticky notes?

Analog slows you down—just enough

In high-pressure incidents, people tend to:

• Skim past information they think they already know
• Jump straight to familiar fixes
• Talk over each other in fast-moving chat channels

Analog tools introduce tiny, beneficial friction:

• Writing something on a whiteboard forces you to summarize it
• Drawing a diagram demands that you check your mental model
• Moving sticky notes into “confirmed” or “discarded” columns gives visual clarity

This is not about being inefficient. It’s about creating a thoughtful ritual that:

• Reduces knee-jerk reactions
• Encourages deliberate shared decisions
• Minimizes misalignment between people and teams

Tangibility in the analog revival

Across many domains, we’re seeing an analog revival:

• Vinyl records and film cameras
• Paper planners and bullet journals
• Physical books and board games

The underlying pattern: tangible objects that spark joy, invite pause, and make work or leisure feel more grounded. The incident kitchen cart taps into that same trend.

During a stressful event, having something physical to point at, rearrange, and annotate:

• Gives a sense of control in the chaos
• Anchors attention in a single place (instead of 12 browser tabs)
• Makes collaboration feel more human and less like pure screen time

Using a Cart in Constrained or Shared Spaces

A small, mobile cart is especially helpful when you:

• Share a floor with multiple teams
• Have rotating or hot desks
• Work in open-plan offices with few private rooms

Flexible “pop-up” incident spaces

With a mobile cart, you can create temporary incident hubs wherever they’re needed:

• Park it near the SRE team for the first hour
• Roll it to the payments engineers as the incident scope narrows
• Bring it to a quiet corner when you need to run a retrospective debrief

Instead of fighting over a conference room calendar, you:

• Claim a small footprint of space
• For exactly as long as you need it

Inclusive by design

Not everyone can or wants to abandon their desks for hours on end, especially in hybrid or accessibility-focused environments. A rolling cart:

• Lets people contribute where they’re already set up
• Allows quieter subject-matter experts to join when context comes to them
• Reduces the cognitive and physical overhead of “moving camp” for the entire team

Pairing Analog Rituals with Digital Tools Like xMatters

An analog cart doesn’t replace your digital tooling—it amplifies it.

Consider how it might work with a modern incident management platform like xMatters:

Digital orchestration, analog focus

• xMatters handles the heavy lifting:
  • Detecting incidents from monitoring signals
  • Paging the right on-call teams
  • Coordinating status updates and automations
• The cart provides the physical focal point:
  • Clear, shared view of impact, timeline, and decisions
  • A way to surface what matters most from the digital noise

Example workflow

1. Incident kicks off in xMatters

   • Alerts go out, channels are created, workflows trigger.

2. Incident leader rolls the cart to the relevant team area

   • Grabs a template incident canvas from the cart
   • Writes the incident ID, start time, and primary impact on the board

3. Printed context from xMatters

   • Pull a quick incident report or timeline export
   • Print key metrics or dashboards and pin to the board

4. Hybrid analog-digital ritual

   • Every 15–20 minutes, pause to:
     • Update the board’s status section
     • Move sticky notes (hypotheses / tasks) based on what’s in xMatters and monitoring tools
     • Capture major decisions on paper and in the incident log

5. Follow-through and learning

   • After resolution, roll the cart to a quiet corner for a quick debrief
   • Use the physical artifacts (photos of boards, stacks of notes) to:
     • Inform the official post-incident review in xMatters
     • Improve runbooks and automation rules

This pairing gives you the best of both worlds:

• Tactile clarity and human connection
• Automated reliability, notifications, and searchable history

Getting Started with Your Own Incident Kitchen Cart

You don’t need a big budget or a design committee. You can pilot this in a week.

1. Find a cart

   • Office supply store, IKEA, or repurpose an unused AV/kitchen cart
   • Prioritize wheels that roll smoothly and lock

2. Choose your core tools

   • Small whiteboard or pinboard
   • Sticky notes, markers, tape, clipboards
   • A few printed templates (incident summary, timeline, task list)

3. Define a lightweight ritual

   • When a P1 incident starts, someone is assigned “cart captain”
   • The captain rolls the cart to the main team cluster
   • Every 15–20 minutes, they lead a 2-minute board update

4. Integrate with your digital stack

   • Decide which views from xMatters, monitoring, or ticketing get printed
   • Standardize a minimal set of paper artifacts to use each time

5. Iterate after each incident

   • What felt helpful? What was overkill?
   • Which physical artifacts ended up being most valuable in the debrief?
   • Adjust the cart’s contents accordingly

Conclusion: A More Human Way to Handle High Stakes

A rolling analog incident kitchen cart won’t fix your monitoring gaps or rewrite your runbooks. What it will do is change how people experience the incident:

• From scrambling across tools to gathering around a shared, tangible context
• From purely reactive scrambling to a more deliberate, ritualized response
• From “we need a war room” to “we can bring the room to wherever the work is”

In a world of increasingly complex systems and powerful digital platforms like xMatters, a small cart filled with paper might seem quaint. But that’s precisely the point: it reintroduces focus, touch, and presence into one of the most stressful forms of knowledge work.

If you’re short on space—or simply eager to make incidents more humane—try rolling a paper command center between desks. You might discover that your most effective war room was never a room at all.