Written while it is still true

Post-mortems are usually written days afterwards from Slack scrollback and half-remembered timings, which is why the timeline section is the part everyone dreads and the part most likely to be wrong.

Here the timeline already exists: when the score started climbing, when the incident opened, who was paged and when they acknowledged, which process was blamed, when recovery was confirmed. MonOps assembles the record. Your team adds the judgement — what it meant, what you are changing.

It also carries a verdict on MonOps itself: was this incident predicted in advance, and by how much lead time? A miss is written down next to the calls that landed. The write-up grades the tool as well as the outage.