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 & OfficeBeginner★ 781⑂ 110AI 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
- "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.
- "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.
- "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)
- Download the ZIP with the button below.
- In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
- Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the 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.
- Open a terminal (Terminal on macOS/Linux, WSL or Git Bash on Windows).
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills.git - Create the skills folder if needed:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills - Copy just this skill:
cp -r claude-skills/dist/pi/.agents/skills/after-action-report ~/.claude/skills/ - Verify with
ls ~/.claude/skills/after-action-report— you should seeSKILL.mdand areferences/folder. - Restart Claude Code, then try: "Run a postmortem on yesterday's incident."
- Collect logs, chat transcripts, a rough timeline, and impact numbers beforehand — the report quality depends on those inputs.
View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT