AAR Themes Report: March 2024

After Action Review Themes: March 2024

This is the monthly update on the themes that came out of our After Action Review sessions in March. See below for key themes and opportunities, lessons learned, best practices, recommendations for immediate impact, and actions for long-term improvement.

Areas to Celebrate and Strengthen

In what ways did Stoneridge succeed in our projects this month?

• Client Centricity: Team members prioritized client relationships, staying flexible, present, and open to helping the client when needed. In these projects, team members balanced supporting the client with providing them opportunities to be independent to help empower the client to take ownership of their solution.  

• Tenacity: Through challenging projects, team members were resilient when change or pivots were needed. Our teams’ collective experience, values, and skills enabled our teams to be flexible in these scenarios.  

• Technical Excellence: Our teams collaborated effectively across practices in multi-workload projects, helping each other understand their respective systems and best practices, along with other technical and strategic knowledge team members are successfully applying to other projects. Team members committed to learning about each other's ways of working and integrating as effectively as possible. Although multi-workload engagements are not without their challenges, team members took this opportunity to learn and identify ways to more efficiently problem solve in the future. 

• Integrity: In several of the March AARs, team members were recognized for going above and beyond to raise the standard of quality within their projects. These individuals extended themselves to take initiative and lead in their workstreams, learn new things, and openly collaborate to solve problems. Team members are also utilizing their experience on challenging projects to contribute to resources and guidelines to help teams on future similar projects.  

Key Themes and Opportunities

What are key areas we can improve?

Client Ownership: There was difficulty on a couple projects to help the client understand and embrace their expected level of ownership and responsibility in the Proven Process. This manifested in a few ways:  

• Helping the client understand and own their side of Azure DevOps (ADO) usage without Stoneridge taking on a bulk of responsibility--this created downstream confusion on what was or was not signed off by the client, traceability, and overall consistency in how ADO is used.  

• Keeping the client engaged in designing and testing the system early in preparation for key milestone events such as CRP and UAT.  

• Navigating change control, scope creep, and how we set expectations with the client when it comes to ongoing requests for changes or new requirements.  

Navigating Quick Timelines: The onset of a project helps set the tone for the rest of the engagement. Team members were challenged to find scalable ways to navigate projects with extreme timeline limits, making it difficult to maintain a high standard of quality and staying true to our Proven Process while balancing constraints. This also resulted in confusion on how to schedule for important events, such as how to approach and prepare for Support internally and externally on such an expedited timeline.  

Scoping and Solutioning: When the client lacks clarity on their business processes, system architecture, and data flow, it can create challenges on how to accurately scope and solution for the client's needs. As the client learns more about the capabilities of our solutions and becomes more familiar with the product, it can also lead to an increase in requests. Our teams had to make several pivots as they learned more about the complexity of their client’s requirements and how that mapped to their current state.

Best Practices & Call To Action

What are some recommendations we can apply for immediate impact?

Best Practices:  

• Having a standard approach to documenting major project activities, clarity on usage of ADO across teams, the utilization of slide decks for testing scenarios, and following deployment checklists to stay aligned internally was effective for our teams, particularly for multi-workload projects. 

• Having the client start on data migration as soon as possible and being sure to continue efforts / follow-up with the client throughout the project to prevent complacency on their end. 

• When anticipating third party integrations, work with the client ahead of time to obtain credentials for permissions and access as soon as possible. This can also help with scoping FDDs earlier and with greater accuracy.

• Teams found that having upfront clarity on roles, responsibilities, and where certain individuals excelled and had stronger skillsets made it easy for team members to reach out to the appropriate resource to help them address certain situations if they needed assistance.  

Multi-Workload Project Alignment: Within the context of any project, ensuring there is alignment from the onset that is iteratively reinforced throughout the implementation helps establish channels for communication and collaboration early and allow for flexible strategizing and approach. Especially for multi-workload projects, prioritizing alignment on understanding the flow of data, integrations, and overall solution upfront, while taking the opportunity to learn more about each other's systems, helps mitigate time spent downstream on solutioning.  

Action Items

What action is currently being taken for longer-term impact? 

Discovery, Requirements Documentation, and Information Maintenance

For projects with longer timelines, particularly between initial discovery and project onset, having a process for storing and maintaining relevant information (such as requirements) can help maintain the integrity and continuity of the project from start to finish and beyond for the lifetime of the client's journey with Stoneridge. Similarly, these processes can help team members address new potential requirements and ideas from the client in the context of an ongoing project by providing a standard for how we define, record, track, and execute on new elements via the appropriate channels (updating and clarifying SOW / contracts, obtaining approval for new requirements, etc.).  

• Outcomes of the Operations Enablement project will help create a consistent approach to document storage and information traceability across the project and client lifecycle. In this initiative, we’re also working toward a common process for estimating and creation, review, and approval of SOWs. Outcomes from that project will be shared and implemented this year, providing guidelines on how to approach estimating and the creation of SOWs to reinforce shared expectations and minimize miscommunication with the client.  

• As part of the Proven Process Baselining initiative, the ADO Usage & Standardization workstream aims to create and clarify cross-functional baseline standards, templates, and guidelines for requirements gathering, documentation, and management, between the use of a Solution Blueprint Workbook and Azure DevOps (ADO). This includes a consistent hierarchy and taxonomy for requirements, as well as templates and tools that help manage requirements throughout the duration of an engagement. A soft release of the updated Solution Blueprint Workbook occurred on 3/29, with full release of the tool and updated ADO templates to support it coming in June. 

Project Forecasting and Project Ramp Up

• The ongoing Operations Enablement initiative aims to centralize resourcing operations and processes, including gaining alignment on how we set up projects and soft + hard book resources during the Align phase of our Proven Process. Work on the Opportunity Management process and how that informs the Resourcing process is underway, with continued outcomes to be felt over the next quarter. 

How can I track progress on AAR action items?

• Subscribe to "Related Roadmap Items" by clicking the hyperlinks in the margin to receive notifications of updates and announcements for the ongoing CI initiatives that map to the above AAR action items.

• Please reach out to Emily Cottam in Continuous Improvement with any questions or feedback regarding our After Action Review objectives, processes, or outcomes.