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After-Action Report (Postmortem / Retro)

Runs a blameless after-action review of an incident, launch, or finished project and outputs a full report with timeline, root cause, and owned action items.

Docs & OfficeBeginner★ 867⑂ 120AI score 10/10Last updated: Sep 15, 2026

What it does

Facilitates a structured retrospective (AAR / postmortem / retro) and produces the written deliverable.

  • Six-section framework: Summary → Timeline → Root cause analysis → Contributing factors → What went well → Action items
  • RCA techniques: Five Whys and causal-chain analysis, each with a worked example
  • Blameless principle: interrogate the system, not the person, while still keeping accountability on actions
  • Action item quality bar: specific, owned, dated, sized, closeable
  • Operating workflow: schedule within 1–2 weeks → gather inputs → run a 60–90 min agenda → write the doc → distribute → track actions to closure
  • Failure-pattern checklist: naming and shaming, generic actions, actions that never close, theater retros, skipping "what went well"
  • If required timeline or impact data is missing, it states the gap instead of fabricating numbers

Out of scope: active incident response (incident-response) and pre-launch planning (launch-runbook).

Who it's for

  • SREs and backend/platform engineers who must write postmortems
  • Team leads and PMs who want sprint or quarterly retros with real output
  • Product and marketing owners capturing lessons after a launch
  • Organizations standardizing an internal AAR document format

Examples

  1. SEV-1 payment outage: paste logs and chat history; it reconstructs the timeline from detection to resolution, drives Five Whys down to "no error-handling checklist in review", and emits an action table with owners and dates.
  2. Post-launch review: even with no failures, it captures what worked as calibration and turns it into reusable rules for the next launch.
  3. Quarterly project closeout: orders key decisions and pivots chronologically and re-surfaces unclosed actions from the prior AAR to expose organizational patterns.

· · · 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/codex/.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/codex/.agents/skills/after-action-report folder from the GitHub repo rampstackco/claude-skills into my ~/.claude/skills/rampstackco-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 /tmp/claude-skills && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/claude-skills/dist/codex/.agents/skills/after-action-report ~/.claude/skills/

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

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills.git
  3. Create the skills folder: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  4. Copy the skill: cp -r claude-skills/dist/codex/.agents/skills/after-action-report ~/.claude/skills/
  5. Verify with ls ~/.claude/skills/after-action-report that SKILL.md and references/aar-template.md are present (copy the template from the repo path if it is missing).
  6. Restart Claude Code, then ask something like "write a postmortem for yesterday's outage" or "run a retro on this launch" to trigger the skill.
View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT