Blameless Post-Mortem Practices: Incident Timelines, Root Cause Analysis, and Organizational Learning

Calendar February 22, 2026
Observability
Intermediate
Post-Mortem-Facilitation, Root-Cause-Analysis, Incident-Timeline-Construction, Action-Item-Tracking
Post-Mortem, Incident-Response, Root-Cause-Analysis, 5-Whys, Blameless-Culture, Sre, Incident-Management, Action-Items
Grafana, Pagerduty, Opsgenie, Jira, Confluence, Slack

What a Post-Mortem Is and Is Not#

A post-mortem is a structured analysis of an incident conducted after the incident is resolved. Its purpose is to understand what happened, why it happened, and what changes will prevent it from happening again. It is not a blame assignment exercise. It is not a performance review. It is not a formality to check a compliance box.

The output of a good post-mortem is a set of concrete action items that improve the system. Not the humans – the system. If your post-mortem concludes with “engineer X should have been more careful,” you have failed at the process. Humans make mistakes. Systems should be designed so that human mistakes do not cause outages, and when they do, the blast radius is contained.

Post-Mortem Action Item Tracking

Calendar February 22, 2026
Sre
Intermediate, Advanced
Action-Item-Categorization, Prioritization-Framework, Ownership-Assignment, Follow-Up-Cadence-Design, Completion-Rate-Measurement
Post-Mortem, Action-Items, Incident-Follow-Up, Reliability-Improvement, Action-Tracking, Completion-Rates, Accountability
Jira, Linear, Asana, Github-Issues, Slack, Prometheus

The Action Item Problem#

Post-mortem reviews produce action items. Teams agree on what needs to change. Then weeks pass, priorities shift, and items quietly decay into a backlog nobody checks. The next incident hits the same root cause, and the post-mortem produces the same action items again.

Studies of recurring incidents consistently show the root cause was identified in a previous post-mortem, and the corresponding action item was never completed. Action item tracking is the mechanism by which incidents make systems more reliable instead of just more documented.