Quick Tips: How to Post Mortem Every Incident

Post mortems are crucial for investigating incidents to determine their causes and learn from them, and they should not be reserved solely for major incidents. Conducting post mortems for every incident, especially those that disrupt team members, can lead to improvements in team efficiency and product quality. To streamline the process, teams like PagerDuty recommend establishing thresholds for which incidents require full team attention and which can be reviewed by individuals, batching minor incidents for weekly reviews, and utilizing tools like analytics to prioritize resolutions without assigning blame. Simple outcomes from these reviews may include adjusting alert thresholds, adding filters, tracking repeat incidents, or updating runbooks. By documenting all supporting materials and outcomes, teams can build a comprehensive library that aids in onboarding, training, and continuous product improvement.