I was a sceptic, when I first saw 'blameless' post mortem used. Our sister group wiped out our production database and put together a lovely GIT issues template on how this was mostly not their fault. Great...
However... this has become one of the most powerful changes in our extended group's engineering culture. The focus on what happened and how, rather than the who. Each time, it is a chance to examine how things went kittywampus and how we can break that chain in the future. For the most part, I don't even think we include the names of the people involved. The process grew on me, the more we used it. Folks would fess up, rather than hide it and creating a snipe hunt for root cause. We were able to categorize where our pain point were and what we could do to stop it - and it worked. It really made the folks who could analyze what happened and how we could do better with what we have, shine.
However... this has become one of the most powerful changes in our extended group's engineering culture. The focus on what happened and how, rather than the who. Each time, it is a chance to examine how things went kittywampus and how we can break that chain in the future. For the most part, I don't even think we include the names of the people involved. The process grew on me, the more we used it. Folks would fess up, rather than hide it and creating a snipe hunt for root cause. We were able to categorize where our pain point were and what we could do to stop it - and it worked. It really made the folks who could analyze what happened and how we could do better with what we have, shine.