Postmortem Candor – Long-Term Resolution
The idea of the postmortem, also referred to as a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), is to answer at least three key questions – what went wrong, how it was resolved, and what can be done to prevent it in the future. Often, this includes a timeline of events, information from systems and, specifically, their service level indicator, and how the service level objective may have been broken.
Understanding what went wrong is only half the battle; defining it in a way that allows neutrality and states facts only is extremely important. Events and data rather than emotions should drive our discussions. When we call out causality, it should be entirely fact-based.
As we journey through this chapter, we’ll identify more than just the postmortem contents. We’ll discuss how blame and opinion can cause a document to lose its effectiveness and make future proofing against the same issue more difficult. We’ll also discuss...