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TPL-30Reliability

Postmortem Action Tracker

The most common failure of incident response isn't the response — it's the follow-through. This tracker exists because 'we'll add it to the backlog' is where good intentions go to die.

Per action item

  • Source incident (linked)
  • Owner (one name, not a team)
  • Priority (P0/P1/P2)
  • Due date
  • Status (proposed / in progress / done / dropped)

Weekly review

One 30-minute meeting a week. Any item overdue by 2+ weeks either gets re-scoped, re-owned, or explicitly dropped. Stale items lose credibility for the whole system.

Aging report

Publish monthly: how many items were opened, closed, still open >30 days. This is the leading indicator of whether learning is landing.

Trend look-back

Quarterly, group action items by theme. Repeated themes (test gaps, monitoring gaps, runbook gaps) point at investments bigger than any single incident.

Common pitfalls

  • Team-level ownership. Individual owner or nothing.
  • Letting the tracker rot. If no one reviews it, it isn't real.
  • Treating 'dropped' as a failure. Dropping is a decision — track it honestly.

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