The folks over at Leading Virtually continue to post interesting items about this frontier topic. "Overcoming Virtual Team Challenges: After Action Reviews" is one such. Apparently, the virtual team responsible for posting this blog (and perhaps some other project responsibilities) have been a bit disappointed in their performance. To their credit, they used their dissatisfaction as a prompt to reflect on what they're doing right and where they have room for improvement:
Upon noticing that our team was losing focus on our project when we moved to a virtual platform, Surinder [Kahai] thought it would be useful for us to conduct an “After Action Review” (AAR) to provide some insight on our team’s problems and help provide some structure to our activities. An After Action Review is essentially a tool that explores what has happened with the team, why it has happened, and what we can do in the future to move forward and fix problems. (Click here to read more about an After Action Review.)
Interestingly, when Shell developed its virtual teaming initiative in the late 1990s, they made After Action Reviews (AAR) a recognized part of the team self-evaluation process. AAR was a methodology developed by the US Army in the 1970s as part of its deep examination of the Vietnam War. Many organizations that we've worked with, including Shell, have used a variant on this approach to debrief project status and help set the course straight.
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