Wrangling Cats: How We Coordinate Red Team Testing

Running red team assessments is hard for an organization, and the coordination around them, including collaboration, approvals and administration, can pull testers away from their research. This talk proposes a dedicated coordinator to take on that load. The coordinator's responsibilities run from intake of a request through prioritization, scoping, resource allocation, training, account provisioning and clearing blockers.

The process described handles two kinds of requests: new technology that business lines want to deploy, and internal customer requests or individual research interests. Requests arrive through a portal or internally, get prioritized and scoped, and prerequisites are completed before testing. Findings are then reported and reviewed with the teams responsible for fixing issues. Jira is the tracking layer: features contain stories, stories contain activities, and tests link back up the hierarchy. Board views with per-person quick filters show progress, and reported fields feed key performance indicators such as assessment timelines, number of assessments, and customer satisfaction.

To make the structure concrete, the speaker used a playful example of taking a cat to the veterinarian, mapping the feature, story, activities and test onto the steps and walking through a live board as the work moved to done. The main takeaway is a repeatable intake-to-closeout workflow, along with Jira conventions and metrics that a team could adapt to run its own red team.