How do you track post-mortem action items?

In an Agile environment, we do this as a matter of course - having a post mortem after each Sprint. That also means a willingness to have all team members engaged, not just senior management. It's then understanding why these action items came about so they won't be duplicated. Sometimes the issues are beyond the control of a specific team or group and may need to be escalated to ensure they're not repeated

Post-mortem action items are specific tasks and recommendations derived from analyzing an incident. They outline concrete steps to prevent or mitigate similar occurrences in the future. These items should adhere to SMART criteria—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Assigning owners, prioritizing tasks, and tracking progress are essential to ensuring that action items are effectively implemented and incident resilience is improved over time.

Track Action Items Post-Mortem by ? Specialized issue-tracking tools like Jira, Trello, or Asana. ? Introduce ownership to every single action item. ? Set deadlines for completion. ? Prioritize them by impact and urgency. ? Keep traceability between action item and root cause analysis. ? Integrate action items with incident management tools. ? Follow-up with progress/status update ? All information in one place ? Schedule follow-ups and reports. ? Provide updates to ensure openness and accountability. ? Consider augmenting with tools for things like knowledge management and collaboration. ? Some best practices in this area are clear ownership, reasonable deadlines, effective prioritization, regular follow-up, and ongoing evaluation.

Post-mortem action items are critical for addressing and preventing future incidents. They should be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—to ensure clarity and effectiveness. Assign these tasks to responsible owners, prioritize them based on impact, and track progress diligently. This structured approach not only addresses the root causes identified in the analysis but also enhances your team's ability to respond proactively to similar issues. Proper implementation and monitoring of these action items are essential for translating post-mortem insights into meaningful, long-term improvements.

They are important because they tend to capture ways to avoid a repeat of the incident. Don't be too precious though, not all post mortem action items are equal, so don't try to go for 100% completion (unless they are critical or impose serious risk). It's normal to capture a lot and then do risk based assessments and complete what's important.

Post-mortem action items are vital for enhancing your security strategy and operations. They address gaps revealed by incidents and demonstrate accountability and transparency to stakeholders, customers, and regulators. Tracking these items ensures that lessons learned are effectively implemented, not overlooked. This proactive approach reinforces a culture of continuous improvement and helps prevent recurrence of issues. By systematically following through on action items, you build trust and show commitment to robust and evolving security practices.

The best way is to connect your incident management tooling with your issue tracker. A few of the incident management tools do connect with issue trackers and also track your post mortem action items (sometimes also called follow-ups).

it is important to - get each action item identifier - set clear ownership - set clear time frame All state above also helps you to also manage your relationship with all your stakeholders as they will always know what / who / when is happening. Also what worked for me is to incorporate those into the Problem Management (and problem ticket)

The key is to communicate action items clearly to all stakeholders and review progress regularly. Best practices include validating completion with concrete evidence and feedback to ensure that improvements are genuinely implemented. Equally important is celebrating the achievements of team members who contribute to resolving issues, which fosters a positive culture and reinforces the value of proactive incident management.

Define relevant KPIs and metrics aligned with your security goals to assess effectiveness. Collect and analyze data to show how these actions have enhanced your security posture and reduced risk. Benchmark results against your baseline and industry standards to identify improvements and uncover remaining gaps or new weaknesses. This approach not only validates the effectiveness of your actions but also drives continuous enhancement of your security strategy and operations.

As a Incident/Problem manager one of the key roles in post-mortem is to ask the right questions to get from the audience/stakeholders the required information to put together and document it. I always used a "cheat sheet" which was a set of questions which helped me to assess all the possible and impossible areas of what went wrong. I would consider this more as a problem management than incident management.

Solicit feedback from your team and stakeholders to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of your methods. Continuously review and update your tools to ensure they remain fit for purpose and user-friendly. Streamline workflows and automate tasks to minimize errors and delays. Embrace both successes and failures as learning opportunities, applying best practices and lessons learned to enhance future incident responses. This iterative approach fosters continuous improvement and resilience in your security strategy.

To track post-mortem action items, I manage urgent and critical actions as immediate projects, addressing resource scalability to ensure business safety and operations, preventing staff burnout by bringing in external resources or reallocating internal ones, and ensuring all critical changes and upgrades have board approval, making the process both efficient and thorough.