The Incident Follow-Up Completion Rate

Postmortems produce action items. How many actually ship? The metric, the dashboard, and the conversation it forces.

The metric

Per quarter: action items opened from postmortems vs action items completed.

Healthy ratio: 70%+. Below 50% means postmortems are theatre.

Track per team. Some teams ship; some do not. Patterns reveal capability gaps.

Dashboard

Per team: opened, completed, overdue, completion rate. Color-coded.

Visible to leadership. The metric stops being optional when leadership reads it weekly.

Linked from every postmortem. Authors see whether the team has bandwidth before adding more action items.

The conversation

Below-50% teams need help. Either the action items are too ambitious, or the team is too busy with other work.

Resource decisions follow. 'We need to either staff up or stop committing to action items we cannot ship.'

Honesty beats theatre. A team that ships 70% of fewer items beats one that opens 100 and ships 30.