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| Criterion |  Operations After-Action Review |  DevOps Blameless Postmortem |  Operations Fishbone Diagram |  Operations Root Cause Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | After missions or project phases with unclear outcomes, the method makes visible what actually happened and what can be learned from it. It separates course, effect, and causes so experience turns into solid improvement. | After an incident with damage or a near miss, the method creates a sober field for learning without assigning blame. It directs attention to the course of events, conditions, and effective countermeasures. | When a problem has several possible contributing factors, the method sorts causes by cause areas. It prevents an initial hunch from blocking the view of other plausible drivers. | When a problem keeps recurring and the cause stays unclear, the method exposes the underlying mechanism. It separates symptom, guess, and robust explanation from one another. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 20-45 min | 30-90 min | 30-60 min | 1-4 h |
Participantsdifferent | 3-12 | 3-12 | 2-8 | 3-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Lessons learned, Action items, Event summary | Postmortem Doc, Action Items, Timeline | Fishbone Diagram, Cause Categories, Investigation Backlog | Problem Statement, Cause Hypotheses, Confirmed Causes, Action Plan |
Tagsno overlap | LearningOperationsImprovement | Site Reliability EngineeringIncidentLearningReliability | Root causeQualityOperations | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident |