Claude Skill MartBrowse skillsQuick linesLearn by videoTerminal guideWhat is a Skill?
Back to list

After-Action Report

Runs a structured, blameless postmortem or retrospective on an incident, launch, or finished project and produces a report with timeline, root cause, and owned action items.

Docs & OfficeBeginner781110AI score 10/10Last updated: Aug 28, 2026

What it does

  • Facilitates a structured after-action review (AAR / postmortem / retrospective) for incidents, major launches, or project closeouts.
  • Produces a report in six sections: Summary, Timeline, Root cause analysis, Contributing factors, What went well, Action items.
  • Digs into causes with five whys or a causal chain, with a fully worked example included.
  • Enforces action-item quality: specific, owned by a named person, dated, sized, and closeable — rendered as a table.
  • Provides the end-to-end workflow: schedule (within 1–2 weeks) → gather inputs → run a 60–90 minute meeting agenda → write → distribute → track to closure.
  • Warns against common failure patterns: naming and shaming, generic actions, theater retros, skipping "small" incidents.
  • If required data is missing, it states the gap instead of inventing numbers.

Who it's for

  • On-call / SRE / engineering teams that owe a postmortem after every incident.
  • Team leads whose sprint or quarterly retros produce talk but no lasting lessons.
  • PMs and product owners who want launch learnings captured as an asset.
  • Managers introducing a blameless retrospective culture.

Examples

  1. "We had a 30-minute outage last night from connection pool exhaustion — write the postmortem." → reconstructed timeline, five whys down to a missing code-review checklist, plus a monitoring alert action item.
  2. "We just shipped v2, let's retro it." → timeline of pre-launch decisions, launch-day events, and post-launch monitoring, with an explicit "what went well" section.
  3. "This payment failure has recurred four times this quarter." → causal-chain analysis across technical, config, monitoring, and process factors with owned, dated fixes.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rampstackco/claude-skills/HEAD/dist/pi/.agents/skills/after-action-report/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

If Claude can't open the link, open it yourself and paste the contents instead.

If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the dist/pi/.agents/skills/after-action-report folder from the GitHub repo rampstackco/claude-skills into my ~/.claude/skills/after-action-report/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills.git && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r claude-skills/dist/pi/.agents/skills/after-action-report ~/.claude/skills/

This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Open a terminal (Terminal on macOS/Linux, WSL or Git Bash on Windows).
  2. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills.git
  3. Create the skills folder if needed: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  4. Copy just this skill: cp -r claude-skills/dist/pi/.agents/skills/after-action-report ~/.claude/skills/
  5. Verify with ls ~/.claude/skills/after-action-report — you should see SKILL.md and a references/ folder.
  6. Restart Claude Code, then try: "Run a postmortem on yesterday's incident."
  7. Collect logs, chat transcripts, a rough timeline, and impact numbers beforehand — the report quality depends on those inputs.