Post Mortem Process

What Our Post Mortem Looks Like To Keep Clients Informed

High Level Process Overview

How many times has your company dealt with an outage like a server going down or another high impact network problem and you have no idea what caused it or if it will happen again. That’s what our post mortem process is meant to address so not only do we try and provide a better service but our client knows exactly what went wrong and what can be done next time.

A post mortem process be triggered by a number of things and not always technology related either. Some examples might an upgrade that wasn’t communicated properly or perhaps a client’s expectations weren’t managed properly. It’s a long list but the point is our Experience Liaison along with the help of the rest of the team puts in time and effort to inform, educate and prevent to provider a better IT service.

A Real Example of a post mortem sent to a client

The below post mortem was for a financial client that had their onsite server randomly reboot on morning. Here is the first email that was sent to our contacts.

Greetings John, 

I just wanted to let you know we’re going to investigate the root cause of your server rebooting this morning. 

Once the findings are collected I’ll send you a follow up with a debrief and recommendations if any.  

Kind regards,

Valery Stufano  –  Experience Liaison

The follow email sent a few days later after the process was completed.

Hello John, 

I just wanted to provide you an update on the problem we identified and the steps we took to prevent it from becoming a problem again.

We received a call from Shirley saying they couldn’t access the Data drive, during the call Paul noticed the server was not showing online. A few minutes after we received an alert about the

server going down, as the alert system takes 5 minutes to generate the alert to avoid false positives.

If you have any questions or concerns at all please let us know.

Problem Identified

Backup agent on the server installed an update and rebooted the server.

Steps Taken

We are working with the backup provider to disable or reschedule the automatic updates, so they don’t happen during working hours.

Kind regards,

Valery Stufano  –  Client Experience Liaison