How do you track post-mortem action items?

Post-mortem action items are specific tasks and recommendations derived from analyzing an incident. They outline concrete steps to prevent or mitigate similar occurrences in the future. These items should adhere to SMART criteria—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Assigning owners, prioritizing tasks, and tracking progress are essential to ensuring that action items are effectively implemented and incident resilience is improved over time.

In an Agile environment, we do this as a matter of course - having a post mortem after each Sprint. That also means a willingness to have all team members engaged, not just senior management. It's then understanding why these action items came about so they won't be duplicated. Sometimes the issues are beyond the control of a specific team or group and may need to be escalated to ensure they're not repeated

Track Action Items Post-Mortem by • Specialized issue-tracking tools like Jira, Trello, or Asana. • Introduce ownership to every single action item. • Set deadlines for completion. • Prioritize them by impact and urgency. • Keep traceability between action item and root cause analysis. • Integrate action items with incident management tools. • Follow-up with progress/status update • All information in one place • Schedule follow-ups and reports. • Provide updates to ensure openness and accountability. • Consider augmenting with tools for things like knowledge management and collaboration. • Some best practices in this area are clear ownership, reasonable deadlines, effective prioritization, regular follow-up, and ongoing evaluation.

They are important because they tend to capture ways to avoid a repeat of the incident. Don't be too precious though, not all post mortem action items are equal, so don't try to go for 100% completion (unless they are critical or impose serious risk). It's normal to capture a lot and then do risk based assessments and complete what's important.

The best way is to connect your incident management tooling with your issue tracker. A few of the incident management tools do connect with issue trackers and also track your post mortem action items (sometimes also called follow-ups).

it is important to - get each action item identifier - set clear ownership - set clear time frame All state above also helps you to also manage your relationship with all your stakeholders as they will always know what / who / when is happening. Also what worked for me is to incorporate those into the Problem Management (and problem ticket)

As a Incident/Problem manager one of the key roles in post-mortem is to ask the right questions to get from the audience/stakeholders the required information to put together and document it. I always used a "cheat sheet" which was a set of questions which helped me to assess all the possible and impossible areas of what went wrong. I would consider this more as a problem management than incident management.

To track post-mortem action items, I manage urgent and critical actions as immediate projects, addressing resource scalability to ensure business safety and operations, preventing staff burnout by bringing in external resources or reallocating internal ones, and ensuring all critical changes and upgrades have board approval, making the process both efficient and thorough.