Facilitated Work Sessions

Have you ever heard about projects that struggled to meet deadlines? Or where the quality of the deliverables was not high enough? Or of a project team that struggles with ownership or poor group dynamic? Furthermore, have you encountered projects dealing with high complexity? Yes, obviously, since it lies in the very definition of projects. These are all relatively common issues of project management. This article describes a concept for remedy these issues. Facilitated work sessions exist to speed up projects by producing project deliverables through participatory processes and group dynamics that works, while ensuring ownership of the results and keeping quality up. The general purpose with facilitation is to make it easy for groups to reach a certain goal, and further to make the group achieve more together than the sum of their individual inputs. The article stresses the importance of involving the right people because they are the key to make change happen. The participants are the experts in terms of the content and the facilitator must have the skills to design the process of the work session and lead the people through it.

About Facilitated Work Sessions

• A description of what facilitated work sessions are and why we need them.
  • Cross-functional, 12-20 people, 2-3-day working session
• Definition of Facilitation and its Purpose
  • Design and management of group processes, group can achieve more
  • The Facilitator
    • A Skillset and a Mindset – shortly describe what it generally requires to be a facilitator, e.g. specific values and human skills

Application

• When can it be used, by whom and how?
• Examples of types of work sessions

Benefits of Facilitated Work Sessions

List benefits of using facilitated work sessions

Reflections/limitations

• maybe some reflections on what problems facilitated work sessions cannot solve (reasonable) and in general reflect on the concept and its application and it’s effect on projects.

How to get started?

Tips and a description of what it typically involves/approach

References

Main source: Adams, Tammy and Means, Jan, Facilitating the Project Lifecycle: Skills & Tools to Accelerate Progress for Project Managers, Facilitators, and Six Sigma Project Teams, 2005