If you just want the template then here you go! Otherwise, continue reading to learn more about postmortems.
Why you should write postmortems
The most important reason to write a postmortem is for your own understanding. The process of writing the postmortem will undoubtedly reveal areas where your understanding is not as deep as it should be. This will lead to a better understanding of the problem and better future mitigation. I write blog posts for the same reason, to better understand topics that are important to me.
Postmortems provide documentation of production issues and the mitigation taken to ensure they do not happen again. They are easy documentation to manage because they do not need to be kept up to date. Instead, they describe why an issue occurred at a specific time and what action items resulted. Postmortems are useful documentation for new engineers that are starting to work on the relevant systems, especially engineers who will be involved with keeping the services running.
Postmortems can be used to drive consensus. In my blog post Driving consensus in an engineering organization, I outline the what, why, when, and how of consensus, so I will not repeat that here. My choice of Google Docs as a postmortem template allows the document to be easily copied, shared, and commented on. I also include a table at the top of the template where the participants in the consensus process can be called out with their status. You can use any postmortem template to drive consensus, my template just makes it easier and more explicit.
My consensus blog post gives some ideas about when consensus needs to be driven and when it does not. If consensus needs to be driven about the proper action items needed to make sure a problem does not happen again, that means a postmortems needs to be written. Although there are other reasons to write postmortems, this is a good place to start when deciding if a postmortem is necessary.
Why you should use postmortem templates
Postmortem templates are a place where organizational learning can be gathered. When something goes really wrong then a postmortem should be completed to understand what happened and stop it from happening again. If the issue was caused by failed previous postmortem action item, then the long-term solution may be to update the postmortem template to make a relevant consideration more explicit (more on this in “How to use my template”).
Having standard templates to use for postmortems speeds up the writing process. Writers will not need to make decisions about what sections need to be covered. Writers will understand over time what information is most useful to include in their postmortem and will focus on those areas during problem research.
Having standard templates to use for postmortems speeds up the review process. Reviewers can learn over time what to look for and where.
How to use my template
As a first step to use my template, make your own copy. Then start copying from your template for each postmortem. If you run into a problem twice consider adding a section to your template. This means if you have the same action item in two different postmortems you may need to update the postmortem template to avoid that from happening again. Be careful with being too reactionary with making edits to the template. You should verify that the repeat issue was caused by the postmortem and not an error in implementation, planning, or something else.
Although I recommend using the table at the top of the template to manage your consensus process, this is not necessary. Writing a postmortem without a consensus process will still give you good benefits in terms of improving your action items and creating documentation.
Do not become dogmatic about the postmortem process. Although the benefits of writing postmortems are significant, not all organizations recognize this. Always be cognizant of the environment and adapt accordingly.
Postmortems are never fun. It can be quite painful to go over our mistakes. Nevertheless, it is very important to do so because production issues cannot be accepted. There be no blame as part of the postmortem process. There should be acceptance and commitment to being better.
In case you made it this far and still haven’t made a copy of my template here it is again, enjoy!
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