Start by providing a high-level summary of the incident’s duration, causes, and effects. Include tickets related to the incident and list all the services that were impacted. Once you include all of the background information related to the incident, your team will have everything they need when it’s time to conduct your review.

Use the template with your ITSM team to analyze the incident. Rather than focusing on team members' personal responsibilities during the incident, our template is designed to focus your group’s analysis on root causes. This blameless approach encourages reviewers to collaborate and brainstorm potential solutions. As your ITSM team conducts their review, update the template with new information and data reports for easy accessibility.

Throughout the review, use the template to keep track of new projects you create to prevent the incident from happening again. Under the Follow-up tasks section, list issues raised during the postmortem. You can edit the template to assign tasks and record action items.