The content of the postmortem in executive summary style

We’ll start this chapter by going through many of the common elements of a postmortem or RCA document – I say many because every organization has its own ideas of what goes into this document, how it is stored, and what it calls out. I urge you to both understand how your organization manages theirs and, if you think it’s incomplete, ask about changing the document. The most powerful thing we can do to prepare for outages is to prepare what will happen after, before it happens.

Executive summary style

Before we talk about postmortems, we need to understand the simple truth that the style in which we write has a high impact on how the document is received and the action in response to the outage. This style includes a number of basic ideas.

Simplicity

Do not dive deeply into the technical details when not needed, and ensure the ideas formed from the information can be easily understood by technical...