After-action report template and guide for DR planning

Expanding on the AAR process, Ottomatias Peura, head of growth at Speechly, said the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many businesses into new crises. “At the beginning of the coronavirus, our business experienced some funding shortages due to lockdown; during this time, we had also had the disruption of moving to remote work and all the other added stress that the lockdowns brought,” Peura said.

With any AAR, it is important to state the problem, he said. “We find it helpful to get multiple perspectives and not just have one person working on the AAR so that we can see and describe the problem from different vantage points,” he said. Initially, the emphasis is just on observing and simply trying to figure out what occurred rather than providing a fix.

“After we feel the problem has been explained in detail, then we break down how our organization attempted to solve it,” Peura said. It is important at this stage to understand what the intended outcomes were at the time and if these outcomes were realized. “By focusing not only on our solutions, but also the attempted outcomes, we can assess whether our attempted solution resulted in the desired outcome,” he said.

Critiquing the solution and trying to determine if a better one could have been achieved is an important next step. “Reflecting on the positives and negatives of a given solution in this way allows us to imagine other ways we might approach the problem in the future,” Peura said.

Finally, he said, one of the most important aspects of the AAR process is to codify the better options that are identified and try to embed them into a procedural document like an after-action report template, “so that we know what to do whenever a similar problem arises.”

Similar to a BIA or risk assessment, the AAR should be an ever-changing document, receiving necessary adjustments and critiques when incidents or tests occur.