Incidents will always happen, but they also provide valuable information for teams to learn from and build more resilient operations. The key to success is to see failure as an improvement, building expertise across the organization to quickly resolve and recover from system outages. The ultimate goal of post-incident reviews is to enable continuous improvement to deliver a seamless customer experience and gain a competitive advantage.
It's true that post-incident review processes can feel overwhelming, especially in the wake of a major incident. Too often, the process ends up being treated as a blame game where no one can draw knowledge from. By rethinking your post-incident review process, your organization can turn every incident into a learning opportunity to future-proof your operations.
There are three pillars to a successful post-incident review process:
1. Conduct a human-centered after-action review
Software is built by humans for humans, and response teams are made up of humans, not machines or apps. To truly learn from incidents, it is important to recognize that human expertise is the greatest source of organizational resilience. A meaningful incident review must consider not only the technical challenges but also the social context in which they were handled.
By reflecting on the human actions taken during an incident and the reasons for them, organizations can not only identify opportunities to improve performance, Done Right As a source of resilience that needs to be cultivated.
2. Create a blame-free environment
After-mortem reviews are not a place for blame. Instead of focusing on who was right or who was wrong, they focus on what enabled people to make certain decisions. Shift from blame to curiosity. Instead of asking, “Why did this happen?”, ask, “Why did it make sense for us to respond this way?”
Here are some tips for conducting a blameless post-incident review.
- Cultivate psychological safety: Create an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and experiences without fear of blame or retaliation. This openness is essential to uncovering the true causes of the incident.
- Involve a neutral facilitator: Appoint a neutral person to lead the post-incident review. This person should not be directly involved in the incident and can guide the conversation objectively to ensure all perspectives are considered.
- Focus on facts and context: It encourages teams to focus on the facts of the incident and the circumstances under which decisions were made. This approach helps you understand the systemic issues that contributed to the incident.
3. Connecting the dots
Incidents do not occur in isolation. They are best viewed as a series of related events that are analyzed as a whole. Cross-incident analysis enables organizations to identify patterns and surface actionable insights to drive continuous improvement and ultimately reduce the risk and cost of incidents.
Aggregating data from different tools and correlating it into a single platform is key to gaining deeper insights into team dynamics, promoting well-being and optimizing performance. It can surface areas of high stress and identify individuals at risk of burnout or attrition. This empowers leaders to create supportive environments through data-driven decision-making and build more effective incident management processes.
Don't wait to learn from incidents
We know that incidents will continue to occur, so there's no better approach than fostering a learning culture to help your organization protect business continuity, reputation, and revenue. A post-incident review process also plays a key role in keeping your team engaged and motivated. Improving it over time allows your team to spend more time on high-value work instead of putting out fires.
Want to learn more and prepare for your next outage? Check out our free on-demand webinar hosted by Nora Jones, Senior Product Director at PagerDuty.
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