Incident Postmortem & RCA Template

Description

A postmortem written the usual way — under pressure, a day later, from memory — tends to assign a plausible-sounding cause, close the ticket, and change nothing. Then the same failure shows up again three months later wearing a different symptom.

The Incident Postmortem & RCA Template separates four things most postmortems blur together:

• Timeline Reconstruction — what happened and when, built from evidence (logs, timestamps, ticket links), not recollection
• Root Cause Analysis — why it happened, pushed past the first plausible-sounding answer
• Impact & Blast Radius Assessment — what it actually cost, and who was actually affected
• Corrective Actions — what changes as a result, with real owners and dates, not “we’ll be more careful”

What’s included:

• A worksheet for each phase, ready to copy into your own doc or spreadsheet tool
• A full worked example carried through all four phases
• Guidance on running this blameless without making it toothless — targeting the system, not the person who happened to be holding the pager

Who it’s for: Support and ops teams who want incidents to actually stop repeating, not just get closed.

Delivered as a 7-page PDF document (.pdf).