One of the foundations of incident management in SRE practice is the incident retrospective. It documents all the learnings from an incident and serves as a checklist for follow-up actions. If we step back, there are 7 main elements to a retrospective. When done right, these elements help you better understand an incident, what it reveals about the system as a whole, and how to build lasting solutions. In this article, we’ll break down how to elevate these 7 elements to produce more meaningful retrospectives.
1. Messages to Stakeholders
Incident retrospectives can be the core of your communication with customers and other stakeholders, post-incident. We talk a lot about how retrospectives function best when they involve input and feedback from all relevant stakeholders. That doesn't necessarily mean squeezing tons of folks into one meeting or sending out one long pdf to a large group without thoughtful considerations.