Key Ingredients for a Blameless Post Mortem
Blameless Post Mortems: A Key DevOps Tool
Blameless Post Mortems are a powerful DevOps tool to turn incidents into organizational learnings. They help break the cycle and prevent us from making the same mistakes, if done correctly.
Top Success Factors
- Trust: We trust each other; we believe we do the best we can with what we have.
- Safety: We can only learn from what happened if people feel safe to share.
- System Focus: “Human error is not our cause of troubles; instead, human error is a consequence of the design of the tools we gave them.”
- People: Invite the people involved in the incident; they are the experts we need to learn from.
Inspired by
- Effective DevOps by Jennifer Davis & Ryn Daniels
- The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Nicole Forsgren
- The video by Todd Galloway about Post-Event Retrospectives at Rally is also a must-watch. Link to video.
I highly recommend checking out these sources for anyone looking to implement or improve their blameless post-mortem process.