postmotem

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes. - Winston Churchill

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. - John Powell

After Action Reviews (aka postmortem reviews) provide an opportunity for people to pause and take a retrospective look at an event or set of events with the goal of continuous improvement.  This process is best managed by a facilitator, frequently a Quality Assurance representative.  An After Action Review is recommended after events such as:

• a significant service disruption
• a significant outage of a production system/application and the subsequent mitigation steps
• a significant process lapse (frequently communication)
• the deployment of a new system/application
• a significant upgrade to an existing system/application

Since the goal of After Action Reviews is continuous improvement, things that should be covered include:

• successes so that they can be repeated in the future
• challenges and responses
  • could the problems have been anticipated and, if so, were there mitigation plans in place
  • were there deployment/support plans in place and, if so, were they followed
  • what unintended consequences ensued, how were they mitigated, could they have been avoided, and if so, how
• action items

The following practices improve outcomes from an After Action Review meeting or informal discussions:

• add action items to relevant groups' to-do lists and schedule follow-up
• store After Action Review notes in a common accessible location (ITS Sharepoint)
• use a common template for After Action Review notes