Creating and running Retrospectives

A retrospective is invaluable for helping your team learn from incidents. You can use FireHydrant to streamline your retrospective process, which saves time and resources for your team time in the future.

Starting a retrospective

When an incident has been resolved, you can create a templated retrospective (a "retro"). To get started:

In the left nav, click Incidents. You may need to scroll down through your list of active incidents to see your resolved incidents. From the list of resolved incidents, click the incident for which you want to create a retro.

In the overview page for the incident, click Create retrospective for incident. Screen_Shot_2022-04-08_at_9.21_1.png

Although FireHydrant automatically fills in information that was collected during the incident, you can still edit the following key aspects:

Timeline Highlights : Events collected from both Slack and FireHydrant's UI that were deemed important during an incident
Milestones : The times when key moments occurred (incident was started, acknowledged, resolved, etc.)
Deploy Events : Change events marked as suspicious or as a culprit
Contributing Factors : Observed factor(s) that caused the incident to occur
Lessons Learned : Open-ended team storytelling on how to improve for the future
Follow-Ups : Outstanding follow-up actions (after an incident was mitigated but not fully resolved)

When you have finished editing your retrospective, you can publish it by clicking Publish. FireHydrant then automatically generates a PDF that you can view or download by clicking View PDF.

Modifying retrospective questions

You can customize the questions that are asked inside of retrospectives. To edit, add, remove, or re-order questions from your retrospective template, go to Incident response > Retrospective configuration. You can then add additional questions to your retrospective that will appear in the Lessons Learned section of newly created retrospectives.

Questions can have multiple types, the text type will render a text field on the retrospective Screen_Shot_2022-04-08_at_9.22.37_AM.png

Select allows you to create a select field with options Screen_Shot_2022-04-08_at_9.32.35_AM.png

Both question types include an option for Required. When a field is marked as required, a retrospective can not be completed without a value in that field.