5 Best Practices on Nailing Postmortems - Hannah Culver, Blameless

This resource first appeared in issue #18 on 03 Apr 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Systems: Incident Handling, Strategy: Project Management

We’ve started doing incident reports - sort of baby postmortems - in our project, which has been an extremely useful practice in growing more discipline about how issues with availability or security are reported, distributed, and dealt with. It also gives us a library of materials that we can look through to identify any patterns that appear.

This article talks about some best practices for running postmortem processes –

Use visuals
Be a historian - use timelines, but sparingly
Publish promptly - the faster, the more accurate the recollections
Be blameless:
- People are not points of failure.
- Everyone on the team is working with good intentions.
- Failure will happen.
Tell a story

I think we’re pretty good with the blameless/tell a story parts in our incident but the prompt publishing has been a problem - we still need to improve the process, and right now I’m a huge bottleneck - and we’re not using visuals just yet.