A Post-Incident Review (PIR) is a structured retrospective — summary, impact, timeline, root cause, contributing factors, what went well, what didn't, lessons learned — tied to exactly one of three things: an incident, a major-incident stand-down, or a high-risk release's post-deployment monitoring window completing.
Lifecycle
A PIR moves from draft through scheduled and in progress to completed, and can be cancelled from any of the first three states.
Getting a head start
Rather than starting from a blank page, a PIR can auto-draft its first pass from whatever the platform already worked out about its subject — RCA findings, the remediation that was taken, correlated changes — so the team is editing a draft, not staring at an empty form. A "regenerate draft" action is available if the underlying incident data changes before the review is finalized.
Action items
Follow-up work identified during the review is tracked separately as action items — each with an assignee, a priority, a due date, and a status — so "we should fix X" doesn't just live in a paragraph of retro notes that nobody revisits.
How a PIR gets started
- Standing down a major incident — closing it out prompts a PIR for the incident.
- Closing a major problem — this happens automatically if one doesn't already exist, so the "major problems need a review" requirement is never something you have to chase manually.
- A high/critical-risk release's Early Life Support window completing — opens automatically as a Post-Implementation Review.
- Directly from a change — useful right after a failed one, pre-titled with the change number.
Example
After a major incident is stood down, its PIR auto-drafts from the incident's RCA and remediation history — root cause, timeline, and impact are already filled in. The team reviews it, adds what went well and what didn't in their own words, and creates two action items: one to add a missing alert threshold, one to update a runbook. The alert-threshold gap gets escalated into its own Problem so it's tracked to completion instead of being forgotten once the retro meeting ends.