Book Image

After Action Review: Continuous Improvement Made Easy

By : Artie Mahal
Book Image

After Action Review: Continuous Improvement Made Easy

By: Artie Mahal

Overview of this book

Even if we're not consciously aware of it, we're constantly seeking improvement. This continual quest for improvement begins when you start differentiating between "what was" and "what could be." Through this book, you’ll learn how to apply both informal and formal continuous improvement approaches to reflect upon and analyze your individual work or the work of your team. The book begins by covering the basic facilitation skills that you'll need to conduct an AAR. These skills include active listening, questioning, information gathering and analysis, managing group dynamics, and more. You'll dive deep into the AAR technique and explore all its aspects in detail including its value proposition and frameworks. As you progress through the book, you'll explore the informal and formal approaches to AAR and understand the situations where each can be used. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to apply this technique and its fundamentals to assess the improve the outcome of your project you undertake or a life event.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Information gathering and analysis

Workshops typically consist of these stages: information gathering, analyses and synthesis, and action plans. These may vary according to the subject matter and professional practice situations being dealt with. Each of these is generic in nature and used in just about every methodology, technique, or tool one may encounter. Brainstorming types and the KJ Method are described in this section.

  • Brainstorming is the first stage, with participants generating their ideas on the topic of focus on sticky notes—one idea per sticky note. It is a technique that helps groups to generate large amounts of information about any topic of interest, for the purpose of further analysis. It is typically followed by the KJ Method of clustering the information. This method is named after Jiro Kawakita who had devised this approach in 1960’s.
  • Affinity Diagram (KJ Method) is the next stage and is used to observe affinity among like ideas, and cluster...