Incident Management Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Jun 10, 2026 4 min read

Postmortem Action Items With Deadlines That Stick

Action items without deadlines never ship. The deadline discipline that drives delivery.

Set the deadline

Each action item: owner + deadline at the postmortem.

Default 30 days; specific items can be sooner or later with reasons.

Weekly: per team, list of in-flight action items with deadlines.

Approaching deadlines surface; teams have time to react.

Overdue: the AI surfaces in leadership review.

Repeated overdues: the team's reliability budget gets adjusted.