postmortems

Postmortems are formal reviews conducted after a significant event or project outcome to understand what happened and how to prevent recurrence. They are widely used in information technology, software development, and operations, but the concept appears in many fields aiming to learn from experience rather than assign blame.

The primary goal is to improve systems and processes. A postmortem documents the event timeline, identifies contributing factors, assesses impact, and outlines root causes. It then specifies lessons learned and concrete action items, with owners and deadlines, to reduce the likelihood of recurrence and to improve resilience.

Typical steps include gathering data from logs and dashboards, interviewing participants, reconstructing a timeline, performing root cause analysis, drafting the lessons learned, and distributing a report to stakeholders. The final report is often stored in a knowledge base to support future incident response and engineering decisions.

Best practices emphasize a blameless culture, cross-functional participation, and avoidance of overly long reports. The postmortem should be readable by diverse audiences, link to affected systems and runbooks, and include metrics that gauge improvement. Tracking progress on action items is essential to turning analysis into change.

Postmortems are related to post-incident reviews and agile retrospectives. In medicine, a postmortem, or autopsy, serves a different purpose. Across domains, the goal is to convert event data into reliable, actionable knowledge that strengthens resilience and reduces risk. Poorly conducted postmortems can waste time or give a false sense of closure if actions are not followed up.