Putting Partnership Into Practice with Before and After Action Reviews
March 24, 2026
This post emerged from the Strengthening Evaluation Contracting Partnerships Initiative’s (SECPI’s) Gathering Space for Strengthening Evaluation Partnerships.
SECPI works to center small and solo community-based evaluation firms by helping commissioners and lead firms adopt more equitable contracting practices and evaluation firms of all sizes strengthen their capacities, build their networks, and increase their visibility.
During SECPI’s monthly Gathering Space for Strengthening Evaluation Partnerships, evaluation consultants learn from each other’s approaches for fostering equitable partnerships and broaden their networks.
During our February 2026 Gathering Space, Carlisle Levine and Hippolyt Pul of SECPI engaged Sonia Taddy-Sandino of Engage R+D in conversation about a practical tool for making authentic partnership more than just a good intention. This post captures our conversation.
How do Before and After Action Reviews help us strengthen partnerships?
We talk a lot about "authentic partnership" and "collaboration" in our field as a value. However, anyone who has worked on complex, multi-stakeholder projects knows that translating those values into everyday practice is easier said than done. When we don’t put them into practice, then they are just aspirations.
So, what does it look like to be intentional about fostering authentic partnership and collaboration? Not just well-meaning, but disciplined?
One practice we've found genuinely useful at Engage R+D — across different team configurations and project types — is Before and After Action Reviews, or BARs and AARs.
So what are BARs and AARs exactly?
They're a structured set of questions you ask at key moments in a project — before major work begins and after it wraps up. Simple, right? The practice has been around for a long time and shows up in many contexts. We encountered it through the Emergent Learning Community, where it's used to support strategy and learning in complex environments. The questions can be adapted, but are typically framed in the following way.
The before questions:
What are our intended results? What does success look like?
What challenges might we encounter?
What have we learned from similar situations?
What will make us successful this time?
The after questions:
What were our intended results? What actually happened? Why were there differences?
What challenges did we encounter?
What would we do differently in the future?
What lessons can we carry forward?
On their own, good questions. But the real power is in putting them into practice.
How have they helped you strengthen partnerships and team cohesion?
Here's the thing — when you bring together commissioners, lead firms, and small or community-based evaluation partners, there are a lot of assumptions we make about roles, communication preferences, and expectations. Those assumptions often go unspoken until tension surfaces.
At Engage R+D, we started experimenting with BARs and AARs on internal project teams a few years ago — and quickly realized they were just as useful for navigating how we work together as they were for managing what we're producing. We've since expanded the practice to include external partners and clients, adapting the questions to center the partnership itself.
For evaluation teams trying to build more equitable, trust-based relationships, that reorientation matters.
How do you use them across a project?
We’ve found it useful to use them at various points throughout a project – at a minimum, during project launch, at one or more mid-points, and upon project completion.
At the Beginning
At the beginning of a project, BARs help us move beyond discussing scope and project design. We dedicate time at the start to talk about how we'll work together. We discuss working styles, communication preferences, decision making — the stuff we often make assumptions about.
We’ve adapted the questions to center partnership and collaboration, for example:
What will make this partnership successful?
What challenges might we encounter, and how might we address them when they arise?
One facilitation tip is to use a format where everyone writes their responses independently before the group discusses. Interactive Google slides or a Mural Board with virtual sticky notes work well for this. This levels the playing field — ensuring every voice, not just the loudest or most senior, shapes the conversation.
At Midpoint
By the middle of most projects, teams have accumulated what I often call "sandpaper moments." Small misunderstandings. Unmet expectations. Friction that's been quietly building. Rather than pushing through it, a midpoint review creates an intentional pause to name what is getting in the way or facilitating our collective efforts.
Questions we ask include:
How did we expect our partnership to work?
What's been effective, and what has facilitated that?
What's been hard or has hindered our ability to work well together?
What can we do differently going forward?
These conversations aren't always comfortable. But naming what's hard — in a structured, respectful setting — allows teams to course-correct before small tensions become entrenched ones.
At close (AAR)
This is where you return to your original intentions. What did we set out to do? What did we achieve? Why were there differences? What do we carry forward?
The goal isn't to assign blame. It's to make sure the lessons don't just live in one person's head — they become shared knowledge.
Do you have any tips for using BARs and AARs well?
Here are few things we've learned along the way:
Repetition is everything. You can't do one BAR and expect a culture shift. It has to become part of the rhythm of our work — something teams expect and value. The more consistently we use it, the less uncomfortable those honest conversations become. At the end of the day, it makes us a more effective team, and it’s a more gratifying experience.
Think carefully about who facilitates and how you structure the conversation. Having someone other than the project lead run the session — whether that's another team member or someone external — changes the dynamic. People speak more freely when power isn't in the room in the same way.The sticky note approach also really helps. Having everyone write independently before discussing ensures the reflection isn't shaped by whomever speaks first. Especially in partnerships with real or perceived power differences, that structure matters.
Be prepared for uncomfortable conversations. Our work can be demanding and stressful. It often moves fast, and we’re focused on deadlines and deliverables. Slowing down to examine how we're working together — not just what we're producing — can feel like a luxury. Many of the tensions evaluation teams experience come down to different assumptions about pace, style, and approach. Naming them openly makes it possible to work through them with more respect and less friction.
Stay open and curious: When things don’t go as planned, it’s easy to take a defensive stance or try to justify why something went sideways. Stay open and curious. These reflective spaces can be valuable spaces for learning about others, as well as ourselves.
Any closing thoughts?
Authentic partnership isn't a value you can state once and check off. It's something we must deliberately and intentionally build together. BARs and AARs won't solve every challenge, but they give teams a shared language and a structured tool to actually do the work of working together. That's a good place to start!
Sonia Taddy-Sandino is co-executive director of Engage R+D.
Carlisle Levine and Hippolyt Pul co-lead SECPI.
