To expound, if you focus too much on “Jeff did X wrong”, the take home message of the postmortem is “don’t be Jeff”. If you focus on “trying to solve X by Y fa

To expound, if you focus too much on “Jeff did X wrong”, the take home message of the postmortem is “don’t be Jeff”. If you focus on “trying to solve X by Y failed because Z”, you have the more generally applicable message, “don’t do Y to solve X unless you can deal with Z”. Also keep in mind that Microsoft today is a robust corporation with many jealously defended fiefdoms; carefully picking the people to throw under the bus to protect your fiefdom and attack your internal competitors’ fiefdoms is an important skill set in such an environment. You could be seeing that in this postmortem, and that is exactly what people are trying to stop by keeping postmortems “blameless”.