Retrospectives

What is a retrospective?

A Blameless retrospective ⎯ or post-incident analysis ⎯ is used to quickly determine a) what went wrong with an incident and b) what steps were performed to troubleshoot & resolve the issue. The purpose of a retrospective is to facilitate a deeper understanding of your organization's incident management processes, with an eye to improving those processes & workflows over time.

View a retrospective

A dedicated retrospective is automatically created every time you create a new incident. To view a retrospective:

1. Start an incident.
2. In your messaging app (e.g., Slack), click on the auto-created incident number.
   1. Blameless launches in a new tab, featuring the Incident screen. 
3. In the Retrospective panel on the top of the screen, click the newly-created retrospective number link (RS-175 in graphic below).

The Retrospective screen

The Retrospective screen is used to view a retrospective's summary information, review a timeline of the associated incident, present structured questions, and a markdown-based analytics panel.

Top panel: Key retrospective data

The top panel displays summary data about the retrospective, including:

• Severity: The assigned severity of the associated incident.
• Retrospective State: The current state of the retrospective. 
• Created: Date & time stamp of when the retrospective was created.
• Updated: When the retrospective was last updated.
• Retrospective Owner: The user responsible for completion of the retrospective.
• Incident(s): The associated incident linked to its Incident screen.

Event timeline

The incident's event timeline is automatically imported from the incident record for ease of reference.

Analysis

The Analysis section is a collaborative markdown-based tool that provides an opportunity to record what solutions worked, provide details about the incident was addressed, and to note how triage efforts can be improved upon.

Overview (custom questions)

The Overview section is used as a means to gather critical information about the completed incident. The structure is displayed in a question & answer format that is designed to walk the user step-by-step through the initial process of post-incident analysis.