Live Webinar September 3rd, 2014 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM EDT
Duration: 1 Hour Credits: 1 PDU Category C Free
Presented by : O’Reilly Webcasts

Imagine you had to write a postmortem containing statements like these?

• “We were unable to resolve the outage as quickly as we would have hoped because our decision making was impacted by extreme stress.”
• “We spent two hours repeatedly applying the fix that worked during the previous outage, only to find out that it made no difference in this one.”
• “We did not communicate openly about an escalating outage that was caused by our botched deployment because we thought we were about to lose our jobs.”

While the above scenarios are entirely realistic, it’s hard to find many postmortem write-ups that even hint at these “human factors.”

Their absence is, in part, due to the social stigma associated with publicly acknowledging their contribution to outages. And yet, people dealing with outages are clearly subject to physical exhaustion, psychological stress, not to mention impaired reasoning due to a host of cognitive biases.

This webcast  Dave Zwieback will specifically focus on the effects and mitigation of stress and cognitive biases during outages and postmortems.

This “Human Postmortem” is as important as the technical one, as it enables building more resilient systems and teams, and ultimately reduces the duration and severity of outages.

Presenter: Dave Zwieback (LinkedIn profile) VP of Engineering at Next Big Sound, and author of 3 eBooks  The Human Side of Postmortems,   Antifragile Systems and Teams   and DevOps Hiring, has been managing large-scale mission-critical infrastructure and teams for 17 years.  Dave  writes on Simple Thoughts About Complex Human Systems  and  was previously the head of infrastructure at Knewton, managed UNIX Engineering at D.E. Shaw & Co. and enterprise monitoring tools at Morgan Stanley. He also ran an infrastructure architecture consultancy for 7 years. Follow Dave @mindweather or on mindweather.com.

PDU Category C (PMBOK 5) documentation details:
Process Groups: Executing
Knowledge Areas: 4- Integration 9 – Human Resources

• 4.6 Close Project or Phase
• 9.4 Manage Project Team

As a Category C “Self Directed Learning Activity” remember to document your learning experience and its relationship to project management for your “PDU Audit Trail Folder”

Click to register for The Human Side of Business Postmortems