Identifying Lessons Learned

This course discusses a review process used to examine actions taken and outcomes experienced during a project or event.  The video covers the focus of the course and discusses how you'll apply your learning.

We begin this course with a discussion about the origins of the After Action Review in the U.S. military and its subsequent use within organizations. The AAR is a simple yet very effective process teams use to capture  lessons learned from its past successes and failures, with the goal of improving future performance.

This discussion explains what the After Action Review means.  It also discusses how this structured approach leads the team down a discovery path regarding the effectiveness of actions taken during a project. 

This discussion covers the 5 basic factors examined during an After Action Review, and you'll see how the dynamics of each influence the other.  We also cover how using open-ended questions help to advance the review discussion.

Now that you’ve learned how to use the review process, it’s equally  important to understand how the project purpose drives your project review discussion. In this Lesson,  we spend a little time talking about how the project’s purpose establishes the framework or context for your After Action Review discussion.  

In this discussion, we focus on a straightforward way of documenting the findings and recommendations identified during your review.  A easy to use documentation template is also introduced.  

In this discussion, we recap the key learning points from the course and introduce the learning activity for the course.  

Resources in this section are for mastering the topics reviewed in this class.

Is your team continuously learning and growing? Whether we are talking about individuals or teams, our ability to reach and sustain high performance, depends on our ability to change behavior.

But, how do teams learn from past events … change their behavior and ultimately change the outcome?

In this course,  you will learn a simple yet valuable process for looking back at a recently completed task, event or project to identify the “lessons learned” from this experience.