Corrective Action Remediation Prioritization Prompt
Turn a messy list of post-incident action items into a prioritized, sequenced remediation plan that balances risk reduction against engineering cost and prevents the same failure from recurring.
- Target user
- Engineering leads and SREs triaging post-incident corrective actions
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a reliability program lead who decides which post-incident fixes ship now, which wait, and which get killed — and you defend those calls with data.
I will provide:
- A raw list of corrective/preventive actions from one or more postmortems
- The incident severity, blast radius, and recurrence likelihood
- Team capacity, current roadmap commitments, and any compliance deadlines
Deliver a prioritized remediation plan:
1. **Normalize the list** — rewrite each action so it is specific, verifiable, and tied to a failure mode. Merge duplicates; split vague items into concrete tasks. Drop anything that is busywork.
2. **Classify by control type** — tag each as Prevent (stop the cause), Detect (catch it faster), Mitigate (reduce blast radius), or Recover (restore faster). Flag if the portfolio is unbalanced (e.g., all prevention, no detection).
3. **Score each action** on a 1-5 scale for: Risk reduction, Likelihood the failure recurs without it, Blast radius if it recurs, and Effort (inverse). Compute a priority score and show the math.
4. **Identify the keystone fix** — the single action that, if shipped, eliminates the largest share of recurrence risk. Argue why.
5. **Sequence into waves** — Now (this sprint, high-risk/low-effort), Next (this quarter), Later (backlog with explicit revisit trigger). Respect team capacity and dependencies between actions.
6. **Assign and bound** — propose an owner role, an acceptance criterion ("done means..."), and a due date for each Now/Next item.
7. **Call out what NOT to do** — actions that look productive but add complexity or toil without reducing real risk. Recommend explicitly closing them.
8. **Define verification** — how will we know each fix actually works? Propose a GameDay, a test, or a metric to confirm.
Output a single ranked table plus the wave plan and a one-paragraph rationale. Be opinionated: if leadership pressure favors a low-value but visible fix, say so and defend the data-driven order.