Incident review action items

I recently read the article “Why I don’t like discussing action items during incident reviews” by Lorin Hochstein. The article lists a few reasons why action items should not be discussed during incident reviews1. While I personally think an incident review is a great place to think about possible action items, I am missing one major reason to not decide on action items in that meeting: An incident review is not a planning session.

A planning session is a meeting in which a team reviews all the work they could do from a backlog, prioritizes it, and selects the top items. It’s the meeting where you pick what to do among all the possible things you could be working on.

If you pick what to work on during an incident review, you are not taking into account all the other tasks you can work on. Planning needs to take a holistic approach (and include your product organization/owner, which usually doesn’t attend incident reviews).

For example, let’s say you promise during an incident review meeting that you will do action items X & Y by the end of the month. If you have a feature delivery deadline by the end of the month, will you simply drop it?

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