The Blame Culture

You’re being afraid of making a production deployment because when something goes wrong it will be your fault?
You’re feeling stressed before joining a meeting because you might get accused for a project/product/initiative failure?
Someone can abuse you directly because of any work-related activity?

If your answer to any of the questions above is “yes”, then “congratulations”, you’re working in a Blame Culture environment that indicates your company’s failure.

What is Post Portem

The Post Mortem:

(…) is a process used to identify the causes of a (…) failure (…), and how to prevent them in the future. [1]

It’s that simple! This is a process where we can focus on what has gone wrong and why and this will lead us to the conclusion - how we can avoid similar situations in the future.

In most cases, Post Mortem analysis is a process based on a simple document format in which we provide:

a short description of the event
how it happened
and what steps we intend to take in the future to prevent a similar situation.

Often, there is also a place in such a document to list the members of the team that the incident concerns. Important - we include members of the entire team working on the initiative, not the unit directly related to the incident. This is mainly done so that more details about the situation/incident can be obtained later. In the future, when similar challenges are taken on, these members will usually be more experienced and will know better how to effectively lead/support such initiatives.

Modern Software Development

In a Modern Software Development which often uses agile and lean methodologies that are focused on the outcome, iteration, product requirements and collaboration, there’s no place for the Blame Culture.

Good software is being created by the people who can trust and respect each other. All team members work for the success of the product. Everyone is working to the best of their ability and we must assume they are acting in good faith. No one introduces bugs intentionally and no one sabotages our product.

If something isn't working, if errors occur, it means we need to focus on improving our processes that allowed this to happen.

Keep your work environment clean - get rid of the Blame Culture!