Postmortem Action Completion Rate measures the percentage of action items identified during post-incident reviews that are completed within a defined time window (e.g., 30 days). It reflects the team's ability to follow through on incident learnings and drive real improvement in reliability, process, or tooling.
This measure helps identify whether incident reviews lead to change — or are treated as box-checking exercises. High completion rates suggest a healthy culture of learning and adaptation. Low or inconsistent completion rates may signal process gaps, lack of prioritization, or cultural resistance.
Count all action items generated from postmortems in a given period.
Count how many of those actions were completed within the target timeframe (e.g. 30 days).
Postmortem Action Completion Rate = (Actions completed within target window / Total postmortem actions) × 100
Track action items in a backlog tool or incident management system with due dates and status.
Use labels like from_postmortem to distinguish these from regular work.
Include completion targets (e.g., 30 days) in SLAs or team agreements.
Visualise progress across services, teams, or business units to identify trends.
Closes the loop: Ensures incident learnings result in concrete improvements.
Builds trust: Teams and customers see meaningful action after failures.
Prevents recurrence: Increases system resilience by removing root causes.
Drives culture: Reinforces ownership, follow-through, and continuous learning.
Assign clear ownership and due dates for all postmortem actions.
Prioritise actions with recurring or high-risk impact in team planning.
Include action item progress in regular engineering reviews.
Revisit open items in follow-up retros or ops reviews.
Integrate action tracking with your engineering backlog.
No system of record for tracking postmortem actions.
Actions are logged but never prioritised or assigned.
Teams complete only low-effort actions and skip deeper improvements.
Leadership doesn’t follow through on systemic or cross-cutting actions.
High % of postmortem actions completed within target timeframe.
Actions lead to real changes in code, architecture, processes, or tooling.
Teams take postmortems seriously and allocate capacity for improvements.
Recurring incidents decrease as action quality and follow-through increase.
[[Recurring Incident Rate]]
[[Postmortem Completion Rate]]
[[% of Incidents Linked to Known Architectural Risks]]
[[Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)]]
[[Technical Debt Remediation Throughput]]