Project Management

All the Project Management tools, activities and techniques on this page help you create deliver sustainable change in your organization.

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Clotheslines & Kite Strings
Are you a facilitator / manager who wants to build a strong multicultural team? Are you dealing with strong emotions within your team when decisions are being made, but don't know how to help them recognize and understand each other's differences? Clotheslines & Kite Strings helps your group see how complex decision making is, even if it is made quickly AND gives a step by step workshop process you can run with them.
Skill Will Matrix
Skill Will Matrix is an activity to help you to lead & manage members of your team better. This page shows you how it works in easy-to-follow steps.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a structured process to capture a group’s ideas relating to a topic or issue. Having a structured approach to how you brainstorm increases the quality and efficiency of your efforts. The process below gives you that structured approach. If you use it you won't waste your participant's time and you'll get a lot of great ideas.
Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard is a workshop technique for establishing the most useful high level measures by which to monitor your company’s / unit’s progress and performance against its strategic goals. It’s a great team building activity, process management tool and, when you do it properly, you end up with an action plan that’s fully aligned the company’s strategic plan.
Fishbowl Discussion
Do you want all your key stakeholders pushing with, or against, you and your objectives? A Fishbowl Discussion is a technique used to help a large group of people reach a common understanding on a set of issues or proposal and increase their feeling of participation. In a relatively short amount of time.
Team Review Workshop & Dotmocracy
Team Review Workshop is an activity ready-made for any team meeting. It helps you build a shared understanding within a team about what is working well, areas in need of improvement and areas of opportunity. There is very little facilitation involved as it is easy for people to grasp what they have to do and why they are doing it. A great stimulator of conversation within the group.
Team Role Development
The core aim of Team Role Development is to build relationships between team members of the same team or between multiple team units. The process achieves its objectives by identifying and building synergies between different role types to improve cohesion and efficiency.
Force-Field Analysis
Force-Field Analysis is a structured decision making technique to help you improve the chances your change project or program is successful. This process visualizes your current position and helps you and your group / team rebalance the forces in your favor so the change becomes much more likely to succeed.
Brown Paper Planning (Project Plan Template)
Have you ever seen or created an action plan for a project that failed during delivery? This Brown Paper Planning process is a project plan template that will dramatically increase your chance of success.
Terrible Presents
When you interact with another person you are normally looking to influence them around to your way of thinking in some way. This activity helps your team or participants learn new powers of persuasion in a fun and creative environment.
Prioritization Matrix
Prioritization Matrix is a fun collaborative prioritization tool to compare the relative merits of alternative actions visually. There are elements of action planning, brainstorming, issue analysis and team building in this activity and one that I often use with teams as the conversation is always extremely focused.
Fishbone Diagram
The Fishbone Diagram (also known as the Ishikawa diagram) is used to identify all the factors that have an impact on your problem. It is primarily an issue analysis technique but it also has a motivational and team building effect on participants as they go through the process. There’s nothing like building a shared understanding of a tricky problem to unite a team.
Team Roles and Responsibilities Template
Team Roles & Responsibilities is an activity using a simple template to document roles and responsibilities of those involved in a project. Use this process to assign roles and responsibilities to members of your change / project team and to ensure that the team as a whole can proceed on a firm footing.
The Options Framework
The Options Framework is a structured brainstorming technique you can use with groups of up to 7 people to get a preferred solution to a difficult problem.
SWOT Analysis
At the start of a project / program it's important to get a handle on the current situation. Appreciating your strengths, studying opportunities, pinpointing weaknesses and identifying threats is a prudent way to kick you off in the right direction. Otherwise you may stop things that you shouldn't or spend time, energy and money on stuff that you really should be avoiding at all costs. A great activity to run with your team to achieve this is a SWOT Analysis.
The Team Evolution Curve
Team Evolution Curve is a facilitated discussion you can use with your team about where they are now and what they need to do to evolve. If your goal is to become a high performing team then this tool will help you get there by helping participants see what it is they need to improve.
Group Decision Making Analysis
Group Decision Making Analysis is a team building exercise providing an opportunity for team members to discuss and agree how they can improve decision making. Unlike a lot of the tools and techniques on WorkshopBank it focuses on improving only 1 key process – how to make decisions in a better way. Most groups and teams can improve that side of the way they work don’t you think? This process helps them get there quickly.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Mapping is a highly effective change management activity that helps you and your group reach a shared understanding on the key events, touch points, and activities that your customers receive. Once you have your map you can quickly and easily identify what’s working well (good practice) and not so well (areas for improvement).
5 Whys Root Cause Analysis
5 Whys is a root cause analysis tool for helping teams quickly get to causes of an issue before developing solutions. It’s a great team-builder because the group buys-in to the *real* problems as they surface during the process.
Barriers and Beliefs
This team activity allows your group to surface project and operational barriers to success and deal with them as either Facts or Beliefs. Barriers and Beliefs should be dealt with in different ways. Use this activity to categorise them as one or the other then it’s much easier for your group to create an implementation or remediation plan.
Open Space Technology
Open Space Technology (OST) is an event format used in meetings of 5 to 2,000 people, invented by Harrison Owen in 1985​. Participants create the agenda for themselves and facilitators lead and record the resulting discussions. There’s a twist in this version with the inclusion of a process that gives the organizers a little more control over the agenda. While keeping all the benefits the participants feel from ownership of the day itself.
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholder Mapping is a graphical illustration of how your stakeholders feel towards your change project or program. It helps you to identify who you need to influence and what action you need to take. It's one of the most powerful change management processes on WorkshopBank and a must-do activity for any project manager.​
Expectations Exchange
Expectations Exchange is a team building activity that provides clarity over respective roles in a team. It can also easily be adapted to use between departments and with clients at the start of a project.
Presentation Vision Sheet
Building a presentation as a group can be a tough challenge. If you're not careful you can end up down rabbit holes discussing details that might, or might not, make it into the final deliverable. To avoid this you should agree the high level points first and leave discussing exactly what content you're going to include until after. When you run this activity at the start of a presentation design process you save yourself a lot of time and energy by getting straight to the point of what matters most.
9 Creative Problem Solving Tools For Your Next Breakthrough Idea
This is a suite of creative problem solving tools from Erik op ten Berg - an expert in creative thinking from the Netherlands. His creative problem solving process takes a challenge and finds ideas that are new, useful and meaningful. I guarantee you these activities will help you mobilise your group’s creative thinking skills.
After Action Review (AAR)
The After Action Review (AAR) is a simple and highly effective way to create a project report. It's ideal when you need to unpick what really happened in a project and build learning to drive improvement.
RACI Matrix
A RACI matrix is a grid of activities mapped against the responsible, accountable, consulted and informed stakeholders. Its core purpose is to create clarity across roles.
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