User:RobLa/PostmortemTemplate
Note in 2021 - I see now that there was already a Category:Incidents section on this wiki. The template below was used to create Postmortem-29022020 -- RobLa (talk) 12:53, 11 January 2021 (UTC)[1]
2020 template for postmortems/retrospectives[edit source]
- This is User:RobLa's old template for postmortems from 2020
This page is an example of a postmortem template. Copy everything below "This line" below, and replace this explanation with a brief (e.g. 1000 character) introduction, giving a very short description of the event this is to cover.
------------------------ This line ------------------------
The story[edit source]
- (collaboratively edited objective story of what happened. Third person voice)
(fill me in)
Retrospectives[edit source]
Each subsection below is a retrospective told in first-person voice. It optionally starts with an answer to the implicit question "why should we care what this person thinks?", and then has two subsections: "what went well?" and "what should we look into?".
First provide a bulleted list of the nominated authors, and follow that with the full sections for each author:
- Person A - (explanation of why they should write a section)
- Person B - (same)
- Person C - (same)
Person A’s retrospective[edit source]
(brief first person explanation for involvement)
What went well[edit source]
- (item #1 here. First person voice)
- (item #2)
- (...)
What should we look into?[edit source]
- (item #1 here. First person voice)
- (item #2)
- (...)
Person B’s retrospective[edit source]
What went well[edit source]
- (item #1 here. First person voice)
- (item #2)
- (...)
What should we look into?[edit source]
- (item #1 here. First person voice)
- (item #2)
- (...)
Person C’s retrospective[edit source]
What went well[edit source]
- (item #1 here. First person voice)
- (item #2)
- (...)
What should we look into?[edit source]
- (item #1 here. First person voice)
- (item #2)
- (...)
Lessons learned / things to do better[edit source]
This section is where we come up with a collaborative plan to figure out what to do next. These should be brief bullet points, and should almost always just be pointers to Phab tasks so that we can keep track of who owns the items.
Action items[edit source]
- XX do a thing XX (ACTION: XXpersonXX)
- XX do a another thing XX (ACTION: XXpersonXX)
- etc...
Reference guide[edit source]
Here’s some reference material for learning more about this format
- w:Morbidity and mortality conference - a.k.a. “M&M conference”, used by doctors
- w:After-action_review or AAR. The military version, which apparently dates back to Julius Caesar.
- w:Hotwash - the quick and dirty version. This gets a lot of coverage (e.g.The Hot Wash introductory episode) by the hosts of the w:Manager Tools Podcast.