postmortem-writinglisted

# Postmortem Writing Comprehensive guide to writing effective, blameless postmortems that drive organizational learning and prevent incident recurrence. ## When to Use This Skill - Conducting post-incident reviews - Writing postmortem documents - Facilitating blameless postmortem meetings - Identifying root causes and contributing factors - Creating actionable follow-up items - Building organizational learning culture ## Core Concepts ### 1. Blameless Culture | Blame-Focused | Blameless | |---------------|-----------| | "Who caused this?" | "What conditions allowed this?" | | "Someone made a mistake" | "The system allowed this mistake" | | Punish individuals | Improve systems | | Hide information | Share learnings | | Fear of speaking up | Psychological safety | ### 2. Postmortem Triggers - SEV1 or SEV2 incidents - Customer-facing outages > 15 minutes - Data loss or security incidents - Near-misses that could have been severe - Novel failure modes - Incidents requiring unusual intervention ## Quick Start ### Postmortem Timeline ``` Day 0: Incident occurs Day 1-2: Draft postmortem document Day 3-5: Postmortem meeting Day 5-7: Finalize document, create tickets Week 2+: Action item completion Quarterly: Review patterns across incidents ``` ## Templates ### Template 1: Standard Postmortem ```markdown # Postmortem: [Incident Title] **Date**: 2024-01-15 **Authors**: @alice, @bob **Status**: Draft | In Review | Final **Incident Severity**: SEV2 **Incident Duration**: 4