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Retrospective actions

Retros and postmortems are only worth the actions that get closed. This page defines how actions are captured, tracked and closed, and how follow-through is measured.

Sources

Source Cadence Typical actions
Sprint retrospective every 2 weeks process, collaboration, tooling
Postmortem per Sev1/Sev2 within 5 business days prevent, detect, mitigate, process (template)
Ops review weekly alert tuning, runbook gaps, toil automation
Quarterly review quarterly allocation, standards, team structure

Rules for an action

  • Specific and verifiable: "Add p95 latency alert on payments-gateway at 2 s" — not "improve monitoring".
  • One owner, a person, not a team.
  • Due date within 2 sprints for postmortem actions, by next retro for retro actions.
  • A work item in Azure Boards tagged incident-followup or retro-action, sized like any other item and planned into a sprint from the KTLO allocation.
  • At most 3 actions per retro. Better 2 that close than 8 that rot.

Tracking table

Kept as a shared query in Azure Boards; this is the view reviewed in each retro.

ID Source Action Type Owner Created Due Status Evidence of closure
A-031 INC-1187 Size processor connection limit from Little's law at 2× peak prevent D. Okafor 2026-09-19 2026-09-24 Done PR #412, load test report
A-032 INC-1187 Alert on payments-gateway p95 > 2 s for 5 min detect A. Ribeiro 2026-09-19 2026-09-24 Done rule merged, fired in test
A-033 INC-1187 Canary analysis compares latency at matching traffic mitigate P. Nair 2026-09-19 2026-10-15 In progress —
A-034 Retro S19 PR template asks "does this change a limit, timeout or pool?" process M. Roman 2026-09-26 2026-10-09 Done template updated in all repos
A-035 Retro S19 Rotate review assignments so every engineer reviews infra once a sprint process M. Roman 2026-09-26 2026-10-09 Open —

Statuses: Open → In progress → Done (with evidence) or Dropped (with reason and who agreed).

Ritual

  1. Every retro opens with 5 minutes on the previous retro's actions: done, in progress, dropped.
  2. Overdue actions get a new date once; overdue twice means drop or escalate, explicitly.
  3. Postmortem actions are reviewed in the weekly ops review until closed.
  4. "Done" requires evidence: a PR, a dashboard, a changed template. The check is done by someone other than the owner.

Metrics

Metric Target Reported in
Actions closed by due date ≥ 85% monthly ops report, stakeholder update
Median age of open actions < 21 days retro
Recurrence: incidents linked to a cluster that already had a closed action 0 KTLO metrics
Actions dropped tracked, no target; a high rate means actions are not specific enough retro