Retrospective

Holding a retrospective is the final step in your incident management plan. Conducting a retrospective means analyzing and reviewing an incident to identify root causes and areas for improvement to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

What is a retrospective?

A retrospective is used to close out an incident and usually takes the form of a post-incident meeting involving everyone who worked to respond to or mitigate the incident. 

Retrospectives should provide a psychologically safe space for responders to reflect on the incident, capture valuable insights, and determine necessary action items. For high-severity incidents, consider scheduling the retro for the next working day. A one- or two-day gap between mitigation and retro is acceptable for lower-severity incidents. Beware of any gap over a week, as the incident details won't be fresh in responders' minds. 

Why are retrospectives important?

If you're in the habit of running retrospectives on a regular cadence — and in a blameless way — you will find iterative improvements to make over time. Creating a positive feedback loop and work environment will increase productivity and collaboration and lead to an ideal outcome of an engaged and trusted team.

Incident retrospectives, or post-incident reviews, are critical to helping your team learn from past incidents and improve future operations. Some benefits of conducting retrospectives include: 

• Determines root causes of incidents to prevent future incidents 

• Improves incident response processes

• Boosts organizational learning

• Fosters a culture of continuous improvement

Retrospective best practices

Retrospectives are a powerful tool for improving incident management processes — but, to get the most out of a retro, it's important to follow some best practices to ensure productive and effective sessions.

1. Conduct retrospectives regularly and as a standard part of your incident management plan.

2. Involve anyone who responds to the incident in the retrospective.

3. Share your findings after the retro has occurred in your incident response channel and the broader company so that everyone can access the incident summary and learn for next time.

Automating retrospective processes

Retrospectives are invaluable for helping teams learn from incidents. Many organizations run retros even when things go well because there's always something to learn from the reflection process. 

Implementing tooling that automates many of the manual tasks associated with retrospective processes frees teams to focus on continuous improvement and delivering better outcomes. 

Solutions like FireHydrant automate retrospective processes, such as:

• Track events to create an accurate timeline as everything happens.

• Provide incident review and action items post-incident.

• Offer best practice retrospectives so you're ready to go immediately (or with Firehydrant's robust API, customize your template to fit your internal practice).

However you retro, the goal is to ensure your team captures the critical takeaways of every incident. Retrospectives are how responders decompress, share lessons learned, and create action items to optimize incident response plans and system health moving forward.