“A Facilitator is a content-neutral task leader who forms a group of people into a collaborative team, supporting consensus and uses a range of processes to enable the group to accomplish their task. The Facilitator is responsible for the context.” (Rush, 2013)
Why Facilitated Workshops?
Facilitated workshops are convened because groups have a stake in, interest about, or knowledge of a particular topic and need to do something about it in a collaborative environment that encourages full participation (read Why Hire a Trained Group Facilitator and Certificate vs Certification).
Ideation, Virtual, Large Groups, Consensus-building…
We bring our experience in a wide variety of processes, issues, and number of participants, face-to-face or virtual, to design a unique workshop for your needs that engages the right stakeholders to develop the right outcome.
How Significant is the value of facilitation?
Facilitated workshops have been proven to deliver significant value to organizations; they not only save you money, but also build engagement, build ownership, and enable effective decision-making.
"Methods such as Agile, Scrum, Six Sigma, Lean, and others all prescribe using facilitated workshops to engage stakeholders achieving significant productivity gains."
Agile Strategic Planning makes a Difference
Planning works best when the stakeholders are engaged in developing the plan and when plans become working tools instead of a routine exercise.
We bring Agile concepts to Strategic Planning (read Applying Agile Concepts to Strategic Planning) and Project Planning by engaging the stakeholders and promoting outcome socializing to engage others in the organization ensuring greater acceptance and support. Rather than being events and shelf-ware, plans become useful tools guiding the organization.
Requirements Elicitation with and by the Business drives Ownership
Business analysis and requirements elicitation require collaboration between business and technology and work best when the business is fully engaged and owns the results (read Why, What, When, Who, How, and Where).
We bring together stakeholders engaging them in defining their business and their needs driving accountability and ownership. Our workshops improve productivity and enable projects to complete in one-fourth the time at a lower cost.
Facilitated Business Data Modeling Engages the Business
Data is crucial to business. Business needs to be involved in defining their data and Business Data Modeling is one of the most effective methods to define and document data and business rules. What I’ve found is that, businesses, through a facilitated process, are more capable of modeling their business data needs.
We bring together all stakeholders in a participant-centric environment (read Making Business Data Modeling Easy) to enable effective modeling of the business. Whether process or data, our processes make modeling relatable and understandable - business partners embrace and own the results.
"Our Meeting Facilitation improves client business performance through effective application of state-of-the-art structured facilitation processes. "
Because each workshop is unique, we prepare to understand the desired outcome and dynamics of the participants. We interview to include the wisdom of the group. We design an effective agenda to focus group discussion and thought process enabling a clear outcome. We facilitate fully engaging all using our array of skills, active listening, and tools to encourage participation, improve communication, and understanding, while guiding participants to consensus.
Workshops and projects facilitated by us have increased productivity resulting in a 20% to 40% reduction in effort required to gather information - such as...
- EDS/GM combined Corporate Information Management - their first strategic plan.
- U.S. Treasury Department Financial Management Services (FMS) - 15-workshops to define requirements - process models - for a complete re-engineering of the payment and claim system - took 6 months instead of 2 years.
- ABPMP - Association of Business Process Management Professional - Strategic Plan broadening their view to worldwide.
- Cisco Systems to define their business data model for their Customer Data Warehouse - pulling together "customer" information.
- ADA - Academy of Doctors of Audiology - strategic direction with over 100 key members reaching consensus.
- National Association of Insurance Commissioners' (NAIC) Y2K contingency plan - all 50 Insurance Commissioners reaching consensus.
- Milwaukee County Justice Information Systems - business data model - enabling effective communication between police, district attorneys, and case workers.
- INTEL's project plan for implementing their global general ledger system - engaging all stakeholders, becoming one of their most successful projects.
- United Health Care DPS - data warehouse process and data models - the first time that they were able to share demographic data.
- Star Alliance where they identified that in-flight Wi-Fi was possible - a critical service offering on airlines today.
- Texas Joint Military Forces 2035 Strategic Plan - reviewing this 4-page plan, the length of the U.S. Constitution, is now part of their monthly meetings - something they were unable to do previously.
Contact us to discuss your workshop needs.
Content Knowledge and the Facilitator...
Occasionally, when clients ask us to facilitate workshops/meetings they begin by asking, “Have you worked in such and such industry in the past?”. They are looking for content knowledge, much as they would if they were hiring a consultant. This needs to change. Facilitators don't need to know content, that is the responsibility of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) - the participants. The Facilitator needs to be a Process Expert. When you hire Facilitators, hire based on his or her ability to actively listen, process experience, preparation skills (which are critical to ensure the workshop/meeting is designed to accomplish what the group needs to accomplish) and whether or not he or she is an IAF Certified™ Professional Facilitator (CPF). Effective Facilitators, as Process Experts can facilitate successfully in any such and such industry. Read more...