Think of your work as a four-part process. First, you plan what you're going to do. Second, you brief your team on the plan. Third, you and your team do what you planned to do. Then what?
Too often, the final step gets lost. You plan, you brief, you do-and then you start over again with planning. Given the federal budget cycle, sometimes you start planning again while you're still doing the work.
The fourth part of the process is review. You and your team critique what you did to determine why you met or did not meet your objectives.
Plenty of federal programs get reviews from inspectors general, the Government Accountability Office, agency leaders, the Office of Management and Budget, Congress, watchdog groups and the media. Those assessments can be helpful, but they pose several problems from a management perspective. For one, the reviewers are outsiders who don't know what happened day in and day out. Also, reviews often take so long to complete that their findings or recommendations are useless for the improvement of operations.
Another problem is that outside reviews often are designed to assign accountability, aka blame, for anything that went wrong, rather than to make things better in the future.
Managers often don't include reviews in their processes because they think what's done is done. It's time to move on to the next task. Plus, as the leader of a project, it can be a little scary to find out what your team thought of it-and you.
But when reviews are skipped, important lessons can be overlooked and problems can fester. Even if a team's actions basically went according to plan, ideas for doing things better the next time can get lost in the shuffle for future projects.
If they want to improve their efforts, then managers should include in their processes an honest evaluation of their teams' actions. Thankfully, managers don't have to invent a review method from scratch. The military has been doing smart assessments for decades. The Army calls them "after-action reviews." The Air Force dubs them "debriefs."
Whatever you call them, such reviews must be set up to be useful. Army and Air Force reviews immediately follow actions, so that events are fresh in the participants' minds. Both create environments where the rank and file are on equal footing with the commanding officers, so problems can be identified and potential solutions can flow freely. The services have processes for working the lessons of those reviews back into their regular operations. Two recent books explore their approaches-Be, Know, Do (Jossey-Bass, 2004) by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, and for the Air Force perspective, Flawless Execution (ReganBooks, 2005) by James D. Murphy.
The Army and Air Force realized long ago that the lessons needed to improve operations often reside inside the organization, rather than outside.
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