Conduct Better Post Mortems | Projects | Incidents

Post mortems are an incredibly important tool in project management, incident response and other areas of business. They not only help groups avoid negative problems, but also enhance positive outcomes by digging in and learning what works.

Additionally, post mortems are not a way to blame a team or an individual - they're a way for the group to improve and do better. Cultivating a blame-free environment when conducting post mortems is critical to their success.

This course is designed around two main sections:

Section 1 - How to conduct a post mortem

This section covers how to run a post mortem successfully, and includes things like:

1. Defining what will be included in your post mortem process

2. How to collect information - including identifying who should be involved and what information you need

3. Analyzing what you find - Drawing conclusions from all that data

4. Conducting a post mortem meeting - getting everyone together to brainstorm how to do better next time

5. Implementing improvements - How you'll take what you've learned and make it real

Section 2 - Cultivating a culture of improvement

This section focuses on how to help your team focus on improving, and moving away from blaming. Lectures include:

1. Building buy in - Convincing others that post-mortems are important can be hard, start small and build out.

2. Making a habit of post mortems - They shouldn't be only only on special occasions, do them for every project to help build a habit

3. Blameless - post mortems aren't meant to blame, instead they're meant to help us all do better

Who Should Enroll

This course is meant for anyone who might be involved in a post mortem, or expected to run one. Examples of roles that tend to do this include:

• Software Engineers: Analyze system failures and identify improvements

• Systems Managers: Determine the cause of system faults and avoid them

• Analysts: Figure out why a project is successful and help others do the same

• Customer Support : Pull apart an escalation and avoid them

• Project Managers: Ensure project closure with effective post-mortems, especially following unexpected challenges.

• Scrum Masters: Augment your toolkit with practices that foster team growth and efficiency.

Why Choose This Course:

Every project ,incident, escalation, failure, success (and more!) should be analyzed to see why it happened. You should choose this course because you want to learn from success (and failure), and because you want your team to focus on improving - not blame.