Low-Quality and High-Quality After-Action Review

“Low-Quality and High-Quality After-Action Review” Please respond to the following:

Create a scenario or event in an organization (i.e., safety, training, or another issue) using a low-quality after-action review. Next, speculate on the major negative effects within the organization if the same scenario or event were to reoccur. Support your response with at least two (2) examples of the identified negative effects.

At my current organization, we are an intimate team of five. This leads to everyone wearing several hats to ensure that business operations run as efficiently as possible. We recently had to use a low-quality after-action review for a situation that we encountered. As a recruiting firm, our primary source of income is generated from successful placement of candidates for our clients. We aim daily to live by our motto “Under promise, Over deliver”. Recently, we fell short and the effective client did not take well to it. During the client on-boarding process we advise that they will be presented their first round of candidates within 30-45 days and that we will provide them with bi-weekly updates. This gives us the cushion of vetting the candidates in the event they are not currently qualified in our system. Most recently, our recruiter forgot to mark the client on-boarded and never began sourcing efforts. After 63 days of the client hearing nothing from us they reached out to inquire about what was going on because they were under a tight hiring deadline which they expressed before signing the contract with us. We apologized immediately and offered a discount on the placement fee for the candidate. The client was satisfied with our solution but internally it was far from over. The low-quality action-review lead us make a slight adjustment to the client on-boarding process making it the responsibility of one person versus two. This was nothing can be lost or missed in translation going forward. If this same situation were to occur again, one negative effect could be the loss of respect in the industry. We recruit for one profession and our CEO and his business partner are well respected in the industry for their integrity, efficiency and honesty. A client could view a situation like this as over promising and under delivering which is not what we aim for. Another possible negative effect would be loss of revenue. If we have to continuously discount placement fees we are losing money that we need to keep the business running smoothly.

Watch the video titled “AAR (After Action Review) Definition & Explanation” (2 min 43 s), located below. You may also view the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NI_P0JkC-8. Next, using the reoccurrence of the scenario or event from part one of the discussion, change the low-quality to a high-quality after-action review. Then, suggest the most important lessons-learned using the high-quality after-action review method as an adopted business practice.

The high-quality action review would lead to us adding some automation in place. We would transition from everything being manual to having a system notify the individual that a task has been assigned to them with a reminder notification daily until the task is marked complete. When running a small business, it is very easy to remain married to the processes that worked to get you to where you are. Performing a high-quality action review would allow us to redefine those processes to make us subject to human error and reduce the likelihood of tasks being missed or forgotten. The most important lesson learned would be to evolve as the industry evolves. Running is a business is not a static operation, you have to learn how to make slight adjustments to fit the demands of the current market. This high quality after action review would show us that just because it works today does not mean it will tomorrow. It will also help build shared contextual awareness, reducing or eliminating the silo effect, which is the division of functional areas into their own respective “silos”. The high quality after action review will help By proactively sharing knowledge up, down and across the organization consistently, you not only build greater trust throughout but each silo also learns about each other’s wins, losses and intentions, which means they can also strategically plan two things: 1) how to improve and 2) how to improve as one .

References

Boss, J. (2016, December 1). Don’t Skimp On The After Action Review: 6 Ways An AAR Will Catapult Your Situational Awareness. Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffboss/2016/12/01/dont-skimp-on-the-after-action-review-6-reasons-why/#604e5621ba3d