Two departments share ownership of a critical service and blame each other after every incident. How do you fix it?
Shared service ownership means nobody is accountable, so the blame is a symptom of structure. Give one team ownership with matching authority, make the other department a customer with an interface and an SLO, write incident management and escalation down, and have both department heads visibly back the change.
Answer
Short answer
Shared service ownership almost always means that nobody owns the service. The blame after each incident is the visible symptom of that structure, not the root cause. The fix is to give the service one owning team with the authority to match its accountability. The other department becomes a customer with a written interface, a service level objective and an escalation path. Then you run the transition so that both department heads are seen to back it.
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Likely follow-ups
- The department you did not choose as owner says the decision is political and its engineers stop attending the joint post-incident reviews. What now?
- Neither department head reports to you; one is your peer and one reports to the CFO. How do you get to a decision?
- The service cannot be split cleanly because both departments write to the same tables. Does that change who owns it?
- Six months later the owning team is overloaded with change requests from the other department. How do you stop ownership becoming a queue?
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