Running blameless post-incident reviews
For incident owners, team leads, on-call engineers and service managers who will run or facilitate reviews after outages and other significant incidents. It builds on Root cause analysis and blameless post-incident reviews, which covers triggers, root causes and Five Whys; this course is about running the whole review well: deciding when one is needed and who owns it, building the document from evidence, keeping the language blameless and spotting bias, facilitating the review meeting, and writing action items that get done and shared. Grounded in Google's SRE book and workbook and PagerDuty's open postmortem guides; your incident management policy sets your triggers, severities and deadlines. Ends with a supervisor-graded tabletop exercise.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Length
- About 95 minutes
- Contents
- 5 lessons · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 10 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Decide when an incident needs a post-incident review using triggers agreed in advance, and assign a single owner and a deadline
- Build the review document from evidence: a sourced timeline that starts before the incident, impact from several perspectives, and contributing factors
- Rewrite blameful or animated wording into blameless, factual language, and recognise attribution, confirmation and hindsight bias
- Facilitate a review meeting that tests the analysis and gets commitment to the action plan
- Write action items that are specific, owned, prioritised, tracked and aimed at changing systems, then review, share and follow them through
Course outline
- 1.Decide when to hold a review, and assign one owner and a deadlineLesson · 14 min
- 2.Build the review from evidence: timeline, impact and contributing factorsLesson · 18 min
- 3.Rewrite blameful wording and recognise biasLesson · 14 min
- 4.Facilitate the review meetingLesson · 16 min
- 5.Write action items that get done, then review, share and follow throughLesson · 16 min
- 6.Running blameless post-incident reviews: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 15 questions
- 7.Running blameless post-incident reviews: practical exerciseKnowledge check · 1 question
- 8.Final exam10 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- Google SRE book, Chapter 15: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure (triggers, blamelessness, collaboration, review and sharing)
- Google SRE Workbook, Chapter 10: Postmortem Culture (bad versus good postmortem, action item qualities, organizational incentives, checklist)
- PagerDuty Incident Response documentation: Postmortem Process (owner duties, timings, statuses, meeting agenda)
- PagerDuty Postmortem documentation: The Blameless Postmortem (cognitive biases, what and how questions)
- PagerDuty Postmortem documentation: Step by Step (owner, timeline, impact, contributing factors)
- PagerDuty Postmortem documentation: The Postmortem Meeting (agenda, attendees, facilitator role)
- PagerDuty Postmortem documentation: Analysis Questions
See it with your own jobs and topics
Tell us about your team and we'll walk you through setup, from choosing jobs to your first skills check.