Comparison
Incident reviewvsPre-mortem
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 →Pre-mortem
before starting, everyone wrote down why this will have failed in six months, and two of the reasons were the same.
A structured exercise where the team imagines the project has already failed and writes the story of how. It works because prospective hindsight loosens tongues: people who would not object to a plan will happily explain a failure, especially in writing and in parallel. The output is a list of risks with owners, and it is cheap enough that skipping it on a large project is hard to justify.
Full entry →