After action review template: AAR steps + questions

When you have a lot on your plate, it's tempting to jump from one project to the next without pausing to reflect. But skipping this step means missing valuable lessons that could improve your future work.

After action reviews (AARs) give your team a structured way to assess what went well, what didn't, and how to do better next time. In this article, you'll learn what an AAR is, the four-part process for conducting one, and best practices to turn reflection into real improvement.

What is an after-action review?

An after-action review (AAR) is a structured debrief conducted after a project or event to analyse what happened, why it happened, and how to improve future performance. Teams use AARs to identify strengths, uncover problems, and create actionable plans for continuous improvement.

AARs provide insight into things like:

• Team communication: Is your team sharing information effectively?

• Utilization rate: Do you have enough team members to meet deadlines?

• Project resources: Are resources allocated correctly to produce project deliverables?

• Roles and responsibilities: Are team members clear on their tasks and collaborating well?

An AAR occurs at the end of a project and serves to improve future projects with similar workflows or features. For example, if the AAR reveals that your team struggled to allocate resources due to poor strategy, then you can develop a new allocation strategy for future projects.

AAR vs. post-mortem

What are the 4 parts of an AAR?

An after-action review is a four-part process you can treat like a project workflow. Each phase of the process has steps of its own that facilitate actionable reflection and improvement.

The four phases of an AAR are:

1. Design: Identify the key details of your AAR.

2. Prepare: Collect research on your project and plan the activities of your AAR.

3. Implement: Dive into the reflection and analysis of your AAR.

4. Disseminate: Sort through your findings, write up a report, and create an action plan.

Use the steps below to dive deeper into each phase of the AAR and gain insights into your project's overall performance.

1. Design

The design phase is an opportunity to define the structure of your AAR. Projects have many parts, so it's important to identify what approach you'll take as you look for ways to improve.

Define the scope and objectives:

Your AAR doesn't need to analyse every team member, stakeholder, budget item, and milestone. To get the most insight, define your scope and set key objectives for what you hope to accomplish.

You'll likely come into the review with a basic idea of things you're looking for. Use these ideas as your objectives.

Identify stakeholders:

Stakeholders are anyone involved in the after-action review process, as well as anyone affected by the insights you gain. These may include your team members, customers and clients, project stakeholders, and project executives. Keep these people in mind as you go through your AAR to gain a diverse range of perspectives.

2. Prepare

In the preparation phase, you'll gather information and materials to perform the bulk of the AAR process. This phase should also involve discussion with your team about what activities and questions you want to ask when analysing the parts of your project you identified in the design phase.

Conduct research:

The research part of preparation involves gathering project materials to help your team answer questions during the next phase of the AAR. If you're focusing your AAR on how your team managed the project's budget and resources, then you'll want to access the budget proposal, research the vendors used, and pull up purchase receipts and budget communication logs.

Gather workshop materials:

Your team can brainstorm which workshop activities would work best for your AAR topic. Here are a few effective options:

• Event-storming: Map key events along a timeline using sticky notes to identify pain points in a larger project timeline.

• Pain point mapping: Chart issues on an x- and y-axis grid to visualise effort versus impact.

• "What, So What, Now What?": A reflective model that helps teams move through levels of analysis to find solutions.

3. Implement

The implementation phase is where you'll begin your AAR discussion and analysis. At this point, you should know what you want to talk about in the AAR session, how you want to analyse the topic, and who else is involved.

Conduct workshops and analysis:

• Using the materials you gathered in phase two, begin workshopping your project. If you're event-storming, you'll place key events and actions along an imaginary timeline with sticky notes. Discuss the order of events and identify potential pain points along the timeline. If you're pain-point mapping, you'll chart these points along an x- and y-axis grid, with the y-axis being pain and the x-axis being effort.

Ask four key questions:

There are four key questions to answer during every AAR:

1. What did we expect to happen?

2. What actually occurred?

3. What went well and why?

4. What can we improve upon and how?

By answering these questions, you'll fully debrief the project topic and understand how to improve.

4. Disseminate

After workshopping your project topic and answering the four key questions, it's time to disseminate your findings. The final step is to draft an after-action report that summarizes the information and offers actionable recommendations for the future.

Draw conclusions:

Once you create an after-action report, you can reference it on future projects. You can use this report to draw conclusions about what went well, what didn't, and what corrective actions you should take. For example, you may conclude that you went over budget because you didn't do enough frontend research when creating the budget proposal.

Create an action plan:

When concluding your AAR, propose solutions to improve in the future. While your solutions may not apply to every future project, it can feel good to go into new projects with a higher level of preparedness. For example, the action plan you create may include a detailed budgeting proposal process or a resource allocation strategy.

Many teams pair an after-action review with a lessons learned template or a project debrief template so insights are easy to track and reuse on future projects.

After action review template

Use this free after-action review template as a guide for your next project debrief.

The template includes sections for:

• Defining scope and objectives

• Listing stakeholders and participants

• Documenting the four key questions

• Recording conclusions and action items

Use this document as a companion for your team. Whether you conduct AARs in person or virtually, it will help structure your discussion and capture solutions.

Example of an after-action review

Here's an example of an after-action review for a social media campaign project. This AAR report reviews how the team managed the project's budget and resources.

In this after-action review template, you'll see sections for the team to work through the AAR structure, prepare for the workshop, and answer the four key questions.

Benefits of AARs

AARs help teams learn from experience and continuously improve. When you put insights from your review into action, you'll see better results and stronger team dynamics. Showing team members how to improve with real examples is more effective than simply telling them. This approach allows you to lead by example and build trust.

Benefits of AARs include:

• Inspires innovation: When teams understand where past mistakes occurred, they can develop creative solutions to improve.

• Leads to better decision making: Taking time to reflect helps leaders and team members make better decisions moving forward.

• Identifies past mistakes: AARs provide an opportunity to review past projects and identify any mistakes or mishandled pain points.

• Creates team synergy: The workshop nature of AARs gives groups a chance to work together and produce a valuable action plan, which is positive synergy in action.

• Improves future projects: The ultimate goal of an AAR is to improve future projects.

The main benefit of an AAR is learning from your past to become more skilled for the future. As a form of continuous improvement, AARs help you remove inefficiencies and make incremental changes that lead to long-term results.

Best practices for effective AARs

To get the most value from your after-action reviews, follow these guidelines that help teams move from reflection to real improvement.

• Schedule AARs immediately after events: Hold your review while details are fresh. Waiting too long can cause team members to forget key moments or rationalise what happened.

• Make participation mandatory: Include everyone who was involved in the project, from frontline contributors to leadership. Diverse perspectives lead to richer insights.

• Focus on facts, not blame: Create a safe environment where team members can speak openly. The goal is to understand what happened, not to assign fault.

• Gather relevant data beforehand: Bring project timelines, metrics, and communication logs to the session so discussions stay grounded in evidence.

• Create specific, actionable recommendations: Vague takeaways like "communicate better" are difficult to implement. Instead, define concrete next steps with owners, deadlines, and an implementation plan.

• Document and share findings: An AAR is only valuable if the insights reach the people who can act on them. Distribute your after-action report to relevant stakeholders and store it for future teams to reference.

Streamline your AARs with work management software

Team collaboration is crucial to AARs, and your team will learn a lot from each other as you work together to improve. To streamline project debriefing, place your review template and subsequent action plan in a work management tool.

This will allow you to share your materials and input project information with ease. Create an AAR workflow with Asana and watch how seamlessly your projects improve. Ready to turn your team's insights into action? Get started with Asana today.

Frequently asked questions about after-action reviews