Incident Report Review Pack | SRE Postmortem Checklist, Scoring Matrix, Facilitator Guide and AI Prompts | Editable Templates
Incident Report Review Pack
Turn incomplete, unclear or weak incident reports into structured, evidence-based documents that support better operational decisions.
The Incident Report Review Pack is a practical collection of tools for reviewing the quality of incident reports, identifying gaps and improving how findings, evidence, contributing factors and corrective actions are communicated.
It is designed for SRE, Incident Engineering, QA, IT Operations, Service Management and Reliability teams that want more consistent incident and post-incident reviews.
What’s included
1. Incident Report Quality Checklist
A structured 27-item checklist covering the essential qualities of a strong incident report, including:
- Incident context and impact
- Timeline clarity
- Evidence and traceability
- Analysis quality
- Contributing factors
- Corrective actions
- Ownership and follow-up
Supplied in interactive Word, universal Word and PDF formats.
2. Incident Report Scoring Matrix
A weighted Excel assessment tool that turns report quality into a measurable score.
Use it to:
- Score individual incident reports
- Identify strong and weak reporting areas
- Create a repeatable review process
- Compare improvement between reports
- Prioritise areas requiring attention
3. Before-and-After Report Transformation
A realistic fictional incident report shown in two forms:
- A weak version containing vague timelines, unsupported conclusions and generic corrective actions
- An improved version rewritten using the Quality Checklist categories
Annotations explain what changed, why it changed and how each improvement strengthens the report. A scored comparison demonstrates the difference in quality.
4. Incident Report Facilitator Guide
A practical guide for running structured incident-report review sessions with individuals or teams.
It includes:
- Suggested meeting structure
- Facilitator prompts
- Review stages
- Discussion guidance
- Actions and follow-up considerations
5. AI Review Prompts
Twelve ready-to-use prompts for reviewing incident reports with an AI assistant.
The prompts help examine areas such as:
- Missing or unclear evidence
- Timeline gaps
- Unsupported conclusions
- Human-error assumptions
- Correlation versus causation
- Corrective-action quality
- Ownership and verification
Each prompt is designed to support professional judgement—not replace it.
File formats
The download contains 11 usable files, supplied in a combination of:
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Excel
A README and licence guide is also included to help you select the appropriate file versions and get started.
Who this pack is for
- Site Reliability Engineers
- Incident Engineers and Incident Managers
- QA and Test professionals
- IT Operations teams
- Service Management teams
- Engineering Managers
- Postmortem facilitators
- Consultants reviewing operational reports
- Teams standardising their incident-review process
The content is industry-neutral and can be adapted to different technical and operational environments.
Why use this pack?
Recording an incident is not the same as explaining it well.
A strong incident report should allow its reader to understand:
- What happened
- When it happened
- What evidence supports the findings
- How the conclusions were reached
- What contributed to the incident
- What actions will reduce the likelihood or impact of recurrence
- Who owns those actions and how completion will be verified
This pack provides a repeatable framework for making those expectations visible and measurable.
AI and confidential information
The AI prompts are optional and may be used with your preferred AI assistant.
Do not enter confidential, personal, security-sensitive or commercially restricted information into a public AI service. Anonymise or redact incident content and follow your organisation’s data-handling and AI-use policies.
AI-generated observations should always be reviewed by a suitably qualified person before they are accepted or used.
Important information
- This is a digital download; no physical item will be shipped.
- Example incidents and report content are fictional and provided for training and demonstration purposes.
- The pack supports review and professional judgement but does not provide legal, regulatory or compliance advice.
- Purchase does not permit the files to be resold, redistributed, shared publicly or offered as standalone templates.
- Please read the included README and licence document before use.
After purchase, download the ZIP file and begin with the included README.