What is After Action Review (AAR)?
After Action Review (AAR) was the first post-mission inspection method carried out by the US Army. The US Army defines AAR as:
Professional discussion and review of an event, focusing on performance standards, allowing participants to discover what happened, why it happened, and how to maintain advantages and improve disadvantages.
An after action review (AAR) is a structured review process to analyze what happened, why it happened, and how it can be done better by the participants and those responsible for the project or event.
For the U.S. Army, the advantage of using this method is that when new understanding is generated, it can immediately respond to action. They use AAR to solve many problems. The successful factors of using AAR in the US Army include:
Structured and purposeful dialogue;
Breaking the barriers of hierarchy;
Being able to quickly reflect into action;
Recording the results of learning, etc.
How to Apply After Action Review (AAR)?
After Action Review (AAR) is generally used to improve and summarize the process which is usually a structured the following 5 step process:
What did we expect to happen? (The goal),
What actually happened?
Why are there differences?
What do we learn from it? (Using difference analysis)
What will we do next time? (Keep improve).
In the process, through the guidance of these five questions, people can have a clear understanding of the previous activities, identify the experience and lessons of the team, and identify the possibility of subsequent improvement. And it’s easy to use.
After Action Review Template
Here is a After Action Review template created with Visual Paradigm's strategic analysis tool. You can customize this template by modifying the text, color, clipart, etc.
