Post-Mortems-Template

This is an extension of the Team Handbook Template but can be used on its own.

Inspired by Google after reading the SRE Book

The postmortem process is a written record of an incident. Among other things, it documents the incident’s impact, what caused it, the actions taken to mitigate or fix it, and how to prevent it from happening again.

I’ve been astonished how quickly my team have adopted the new template. Ever since I published the first postmortem in this manner, they’ve been eager to do the same after a new incident has occurred. I’m aware that this is, for the most part, a matter of having the right mindset. However, it certainly doesn’t hurt to make the process more pleasant for everyone involved.

I wanted to put what I've learned into practice, so I decided to write my own Post-Mortem Template and open source it.

This repository contains the Post-Mortem process that we use here. It represents many hours of research, lots of thoughtful debates, and some serious introspection. It’s certainly not perfect, but I think it’s an exciting place to start.

Feel free to fork this repository and use any or all of these processes, and to modify them in whatever way makes sense for your company. I hope that by publishing them, other companies can benefit from my research and improve their own teams change process.

All feedback and suggestions (especially in the form of pull requests) are very appreciated. I’ve gotten several different perspectives to help arrive at these policies, but I am certainly missing many more and making mistakes as a result. This is a work in progress that I hope will get better with more time and more contributors.