Web Operations

Postmortem Follow-Up

Remediations should be tracked to completion. Remember that you are at risk for reoccurrence until your remediations have been completed. Make sure owners and due dates are assigned and that owners are held accountable even after the originating event has faded into the past. Marking them as high-priority items in a bug-tracking system or other similar tool will help to ensure that the right information is recorded and not lost.

Often, corrective actions will compete with development resources for prioritization. It is important to have an executive advocate who will make sure site stability is treated with the same level of importance as site features. As an organization, declaring that site stability is a top priority can go a long way toward ensuring that corrective actions are completed. Remediations should be prioritized based on the potential number of likely incidents they can prevent. If one remediation will stop only the exact incident that just occurred whereas another will fix a number of similar possible incidents, the latter should receive higher prioritization and be the focus of engineering efforts.

Additionally, make sure you enter your postmortem data into a tracking tool. Assign a root-cause category to your incidents to allow for data mining and the ability for management to identify long-term trends. We use incident categories such as Hardware Failure, Change Related, Capacity/Traffic Incident, and Preexisting Software Bug to identify buckets ...