How do you document and review lessons learned from incidents in application support?

1 Define the incident

The first step in documenting and reviewing lessons learned is to define the incident clearly and consistently. An incident is an unplanned disruption or degradation of service that affects one or more users or customers of your application. You should have a clear criteria for what constitutes an incident, such as severity level, duration, frequency, or impact. You should also assign a unique identifier, a category, and a status to each incident, to help you track and prioritize them.

2 Document the incident timeline

The next step is to document the incident timeline, which is a chronological record of what happened before, during, and after the incident. This timeline should include the time and date of the incident occurrence, detection, escalation, resolution, and closure; the symptoms, root cause, and impact; the actions taken by the application support team and other stakeholders; the communication channels used to inform and update affected users or customers; and any challenges, delays, or errors encountered. The incident timeline should be factual, accurate, and concise while avoiding speculation, blame, or opinion.

3 Analyze the incident causes and effects

The third step is to analyze the incident causes and effects, which requires a deeper look into why the incident happened and what the consequences were. This analysis should include the root cause of the incident, any contributing causes, preventive measures that could have been taken, corrective actions that were taken or planned, as well as positive and negative outcomes. It is important to remain objective and thorough when conducting an incident analysis and focus on finding solutions rather than assigning fault.

4 Identify the incident lessons learned

The fourth step is to identify the incident lessons learned, which are the key insights and learnings that emerged from the incident documentation and analysis. This should include information such as the strengths and weaknesses of the application support team, gaps and opportunities for improvement, best practices and recommendations for enhancing quality and efficiency, action items and owners for implementing improvement initiatives, and metrics and indicators for measuring results. The lessons learned should be specific, actionable, and measurable, while also aligning with the application support goals and objectives.