After Action Review

What is it?

An after action review is a structured debrief conducted after a project, event, or milestone to capture what was planned, what actually happened, and why the two diverged. It produces documented lessons and specific action items that feed back into future work.

Originating in military operations and adopted across project management, the after action review sits between the immediate post-incident report and the broader retrospective. It is narrower than a full retrospective, focused on a specific deliverable or phase, but more structured than an informal debrief. The output is a concise document any team member can reference before starting similar work.

Without documented reviews, teams repeat the same mistakes. Lessons stay with whoever was in the room, invisible to the next team facing the same challenge.

Who should use this template?

This after action review template is for teams responsible for project delivery and operational quality:

• Heads of Operations: standardise post-project debriefs across departments so lessons transfer between sites and teams

• Project Managers: run structured reviews after milestones or project close, with clear action items and owners

• Knowledge Managers: capture project lessons in a searchable format that feeds future planning and AI retrieval

• Team Leads: give their teams a repeatable format for honest reflection without blame

How to create this template in Elium

1. Open the Template Builder: Go to your profile menu and select the Template Builder tab, or click “+ Create” and choose “Create a new template”.

2. Set the scope: Choose an icon, enable the template, and decide whether it applies platform-wide or to specific spaces (e.g. your Operations space only).

3. Add structured fields: Click “Field” to add metadata: a text field for project name, a date field for review date, user fields for facilitator and participants, and a tag field for review type (pre-populate with “Post-Project”, “Milestone”, “Post-Incident”). Mark project name and review type as mandatory.

4. Build the body structure: Use the “+” button to add content blocks for each narrative section: objectives, outcomes, and analysis as text blocks; action items as a table block with columns for action, owner, deadline, and status; and follow-up as a text block.

5. Preview and save: Review the template layout, then save. Team members can now select it when creating new articles, and you can apply it to existing content in bulk.

How AI helps

Capture faster. After the review session, feed Elium’s AI the meeting notes or discussion transcript. It generates a structured first draft (objectives, outcomes, analysis, and action items) that the facilitator reviews and refines instead of writing from scratch.

Retrieve smarter. Before starting a similar project, ask Elium’s AI: “What lessons did we learn from the Brussels office migration?” The AI returns specific findings and action items from your previous after action review, not a generic project management guide.

Why teams use Elium for this

An after action review is only valuable when the next team can find it. A debrief saved in a local folder helps one team once. A structured review published in Elium helps every team that faces a similar challenge, because AI-powered search surfaces lessons from a natural question, not a file name.

Bouygues (53,500 employees across construction, telecoms, and media in 80 countries) centralised operational knowledge in Elium to solve exactly this problem. Project lessons were siloed in local drives and email. By structuring knowledge in Elium, they gave distributed teams a single source of truth, reducing repeated mistakes and making cross-site learning practical.