After Action Reporting and Lessons Learned

Its a good idea to keep detailed notes that our teams can use to recreate events and activity timelines when required. Keeping good notes is a fundamental "After Action" or business discipline used when unforeseen incidents or problems are revealed in our businesses and technologies. Being able to recreate events with our notes enable us to retrace the chain of events or actions we took in providing our products and managed services. Our routine and daily business notes should always answer these critical event or activity questions:

> Who was involved and who was impacted?

>What happened?

> Where did it happen?

> When did it happen?

> How did it happen?

> What was done or wasn't done to solve the problem?

> Was a Lesson Learned (or Not Learned)?

An example of a note might look like this: Our customers worked with our tier 1 and 2 teams today when our X managed service failed at locations A and B. The service was down for 45 minutes between 8:00 and 8:45 AM on YYYYMMDD. The system failed when a power failure was experienced within the same block and returned when the power was turned back on. Our team was onsite and walked around to inform the customer what was going on and what to do when the power returned; the team provided business cards with the service desk's contact details if other instructions were later needed. Our team has recommended alternative power solutions before that include: Generator back up, UPS, and in some cases vehicle system backups.

The details provided in these logs or notes should be detailed enough for the event to be recreated for test or reporting purposes.