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My $0.02: Despite being a strong believer in it, I've worked at places that did blameless post-mortems and it was sometimes frustrating because remediation oft
by wgerard 7y ago
My $0.02:
Despite being a strong believer in it, I've worked at places that did blameless post-mortems and it was sometimes frustrating because remediation often felt like a second-class citizen. Remediation is often much more difficult in these environments because systematic changes can obviously much more complex than "fixing" an individual's behavior.
If someone pushes the big red button accidentally I'm fully on-board with the "well what led them to push it and why were there no safeguards?" but it also kinda sucks if you spend so much time on that conversation that there's no time left for "ok, who's going install the confirmation screen for the big red button?"
Sometimes the "remediation" was even just "well, that's just the way it is and we can't do anything about it easily, but hopefully the post-mortem itself will serve as a way to inform people not to push the big red button" which is obviously frustrating because memories are short and people come and go quite frequently in the tech industry.
Anyway, and this might be obvious to some, but remediation is important and sometimes incredibly difficult in these environments. Adopting such an environment requires a commitment to actually fixing the systemic issues. It can sometimes feel more frustrating than "blameworthy" post-mortems especially if it's the same individual(s) over and over again.
- panopticon 7y ago> I've worked at places that did blameless post-mortems and it was sometimes frustrating because remediation often felt like a second-class citizen Maybe I'm missing something, but that seems orthogonal to the blamelessness. Blame won't necessarily bring remediation front-and-center either (and will probably do far more harm do that end).
- mieseratte 7y ago> can obviously much more complex than "fixing" an individual's behavior. My favorite "hate" on the blameless post-mortem's is when it comes down to altering a process that someone owns, because then you're not only fighting for time-budget to fix and issue but you're potentially fighting what is, to them, part of their job and existence. To get tangential, this is also why I hate big-A Agile, because if you have a person who's job is "do Agile," the scrum (master|lord|bag|dumpster), any changes, deviations, or complaints end up feeling like you're attacking that person's job. Never a fight you want to be in.