What is an incident postmortem?
An incident postmortem is a structured review after service has been restored. The people involved record what happened, reconstruct the timeline and examine the conditions that contributed to the failure. The outcome is a shared explanation and concrete corrective work.
Keep the discussion blameless: describe the information, constraints and safeguards present at the time. A useful report helps the team improve detection, prevention and recovery.
Run an incident postmortem in AllScrum
- Open your project’s Meetings tab and choose Start postmortem. Enter the incident title, affected service and severity.
- Draft the shared report. Add timeline events with UTC timestamps and invite the people involved to contribute observations.
- Choose Request review. Check the facts together, discuss contributing factors and agree on improvements. The organiser can return the review to Draft when needed.
- Create and assign corrective tasks in the linked meeting.
- Choose Publish report when the review is ready. The report becomes read-only and is saved with a Postmortem label in Meetings.
Incident postmortem template
Every report starts with these sections:
- What happened? Describe the failure, detection and recovery.
- Customer & service impact. Record the affected functions, users and duration.
- Contributing factors. Explain the conditions and missing safeguards that made the incident possible.
- Response & recovery. Capture what helped and what delayed recovery.
- Prevention & follow-up. Agree on practical changes and connect them to action tasks.
A separate incident timeline puts events in chronological order. Team observations preserve the perspectives, questions and surprises contributed during the review.
Review together
Project members can edit the report section by section. Saved contributions appear as the page refreshes in the background. Version checks protect against overwriting someone else’s changes, while open editors keep your local draft.
The organiser and project admins control publication and guest invitations. Guests can contribute named observations and timeline events without an account. Invitation links remain available after publication until the organiser revokes or resets them.
Track corrective actions after publication
The review and its corrective work have different finish lines. A published incident postmortem records what the team learned; its linked tasks track what still needs to change. Open the meeting to assign those tasks and follow them through the board, backlog or sprint.
Ask AI can summarize the current project’s incident report and prepare improvement tasks for you to confirm. Keep the agreed facts in the shared report and review any suggested tasks before creating them.