3 years ago

Poorly implemented postmortems for IT incidents can be painful for everyone involved; they cost money, and worse yet, they can fail to address the root cause of the problem. In this post, we will discuss some of the pitfalls of postmortems and introduce several best practices that can help smooth the postmortem process — including choosing the right personnel, creating a culture of accountability, and conducting “blameless” postmortems.

In the tech world, postmortems meetings are a key component to an overall process of incident management and are conducted after an undesirable outcome in order to determine what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how it can be avoided in the future.

In short, you want to make sure that your process is solid, you hold people to the process, you always keep in mind that you are dealing with human beings, you are “blame aware,” and you work with your teams to help them understand healthier ways to interact and improve. The following are a few best practices and tips to help you on your journey to a better postmortem process: This article will point you in the right direction when it comes to postmortems, but there are many variables that organizations will need to assess in order to determine what will work best for them.