!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: After-Action Review

Sunday, May 28, 2006

After-Action Review

The US Army has long been using after-action review (AAR) to draw lessons from activities and events.

Various corporations have adopted the AAR process. Unfortunately, as Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry and Joseph Moore point out in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, corporations have generally not emulated the rigor with which the Army ensures that lessons extracted from a particular activity are applied and validated in subsequent activities.

In explaining how corporations can do a better job of implementing AAR, Darling, Parry and Moore recommend that a project team have a before-action review (BAR) at the beginning of each phase of the project, and then a corresponding after action review at the end of each phase.

This phase-by-phase combination of BAR and AAR creates a feedback loop that helps maximize team performance, while also promoting a learning culture.

In the BAR meeting, the team addresses these questions:
  • What are our intended results and measures?


  • What challenges can we anticipate?


  • What have we or others learned from similar situations?


  • What will make us successful this time?
The corresponding questions for the AAR meeting are:
  • What were our intended results?


  • What were are actual results?


  • What caused our actual results? (Note that the Army has found that flawed assumptions are the most common cause of flawed execution.)


  • What will we sustain or improve?
Darling, Parry and Moore emphasize that certain fundamentals must be in place in order for a corporation to have an AAR process that measures up to the effectiveness of the Army's use of AAR:
  • Lessons must directly benefit the team that extracts them.


  • BAR must begin the process.


  • Lessons must link explicitly to future actions.


  • Everyone — managers and employees at all levels — must be accountable for learning.
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