Comparison
Action itemvsIncident review
Action item
the review produced fourteen actions and by the next quarter two of them were done.
A specific piece of follow-up work from an incident review, with an owner and a date. The quantity is the problem: a long list is a way of avoiding the argument about priority, and unowned items decay into a record that the team knew and did nothing. Three that get done beat fourteen that get filed, and the ones worth keeping are the ones that would have changed the outcome.
Full entry →Incident review
you sat down a week later with the timeline and worked out why the wrong dashboard was the obvious one to check.
The structured examination of an incident after it is over, producing a timeline, an understanding and a small number of owned actions. Its purpose is learning, not documentation: a review that produces a file nobody reads and eleven tickets nobody does has cost more than it returned. The best ones spend most of their time on why things made sense to the people involved at the time, because that is where the improvable system lives.
Full entry →