Once the root cause of a problem has been identified, you should brainstorm a few potential strategies for improving/avoiding those problems. The post-mortem meeting is an open forum that is run at the conclusion of a project, where you, your team, and your clients can identify and analyze all aspects related to the project’s lifecycle. Organizations may refer to the postmortem process in slightly different ways: The specifics around conducting postmortems vary from organization to organization. I know I would. The scope of the project will help to define who should be involved in the post-mortem. When done right, the post-mortem can be extremely beneficial for improving the client relationships and procedural operations of your agency or freelance business. You may be one cool tool away from adding precious time back to your day or dealing with background noise at home. Even better, postmortems are now part of the PagerDuty platform — sign up for a free 14-day trial and streamline the entire postmortem process with automated timeline building, collaborative editing, actionable insights, and more. This includes any time incident response is triggered–even if it is later discovered that severity was actually lower, it was a false alarm, or it quickly recovered without intervention. When used effectively, they can help uncover insights that allow your team to improve internal processes, streamline workflows, and find ways to increase overall client satisfaction on future projects. Were the goals of the project clear to all stakeholders? If you ask all responders or a team to do the postmortem, you risk everyone assuming someone else is doing it, therefore no one does. An artifact is produced that includes a detailed description of exactly what went wrong in order to cause the incident, along with a list of steps to take in order to prevent a similar incident from occurring again in the future. Writing the postmortem will ultimately be a collaborative effort, but selecting a single owner to orchestrate this collaboration helps ensure it is done. This ensures that tasks assigned to individuals are completed, timelines for delivery are met, and changes promised actually happen, rather than falling to the sideline. You can unsubscribe anytime. Was the schedule realistic and/or detailed enough? , and (hopefully after this article) your team. What are your strategies for running effective post-mortem meetings? “You ignore the ‘this person did that’ part,” explains PagerDuty Engineering Manager Arup Chakrabarti. Whichever terminology resonates with your team, the key point is that postmortem discussions should be safe spaces in which teams can be completely honest and oriented around improving for the future instead of blaming others for the past.