Blameless Post Mortems: A Key DevOps Tool

Blameless Post Mortems are a powerful DevOps tool to turn incidents into organizational learnings. They help break the cycle and prevent us from making the same mistakes, if done correctly.

Top Success Factors

  • Trust: We trust each other; we believe we do the best we can with what we have.
  • Safety: We can only learn from what happened if people feel safe to share.
  • System Focus: “Human error is not our cause of troubles; instead, human error is a consequence of the design of the tools we gave them.”
  • People: Invite the people involved in the incident; they are the experts we need to learn from.

I made a Blameless Post-Mortem meeting agenda template to help steer my post-mortems in these directions.

Inspired by

I highly recommend checking out these sources for anyone looking to implement or improve their blameless post-mortem process.