BS05 - Facilitation Skills for IT Professionals

Summary

Learn how to plan and effectively facilitate meetings of any size using proven facilitation techniques that will ensure your meeting objectives are achieved. This course also covers how to plan and facilitate JAD type user requirements gathering sessions, data modeling sessions, Use Case development sessions, and general user requirements gathering and validation sessions.

Limited course enrolment ensures plenty of opportunity to practice and interact with other course participants as well as allowing participants to focus on issues specific to their situation.

Several case-study driven workshops and simulations provide all participants with full hands-on facilitation practice, as well as the opportunity to learn and practice strategies to manage difficult participants, and facilitate meetings where you must take an active role in the meeting in addition to acting as the meeting facilitator. Participants also learn how to handle conflict between participants, and receive individual coaching and feedback to maximize learning.

Role & responsibilities of facilitator
(Approximately ½ hour)
• Role of facilitator versus other roles e.g. business analyst
• Discovering your preferred interaction style

Required skills & behavioral criteria
(Approximately ½ hour)
• Skills of facilitation
• Facilitator behavioral criteria

Preparation & planning required to facilitate
(Approximately 2 hours)
• Task, people & process
• Facilitating without subject matter expertise
• Preparing to facilitate
o agreeing terms of reference
o event planning and preparation
o arrangement coordination
o preparing a facilitator’s work plan

Group dynamics
(Approximately 2 hours)
• Working with groups & establishing group norms
• Seating arrangements
• Interpersonal interaction
o dealing with conflict & hostile participants
• Stages of Group interaction & productivity

Facilitator “toolkit” – group process techniques and tools used to:
(Approximately 2 hours)
• Requirements gathering – e.g. Use Case development, Entity Relationship Mapping etc.
• Generate material – e.g. brainstorming, flowcharting, process mapping, etc.
• Ranking & evaluating material – e.g. multi-voting, nominal group technique, etc.

Workshops & exercises to illustrate various techniques
(Approximately 4 hours)
• Workshops are conducted throughout the course to reinforce learning. A final “mock requirements gathering session facilitation” occurs at the end of day 2 to practice skills and techniques taught in the course.