Part Two

Two important pieces of advise come from D'Herbemont and Cesar (Managing Sensitive Projects). First: focus on your allies. If you have to get some points across, and people are against it, the natural reaction is to win them over by paying a lot of energy to them. Instead, you should support the people who agree on the matter in convincing the disbelievers.

In this way you have more people to spread the word and mostly from the same environment as the 'don't wanna's'. And we all have the tendency to accept something faster from someone out of the same environment, then from a total stranger.

The second tip is to create lateral projects. Try to formulate the project or end result in such a way that it appeals to a specific group of people. Perhaps you have to focus differently or to include some stuff to make it interesting. It's a good and funny mechanism to work with.

Getting the right information

How can you get the right information out of the people that are in front of you (remember, you are hosting a workshop)? I thought about this complex question for a long time. I came up with one answer: ask.

If you know from yourself that you are no talker, introvert and have problems with your communication skills, this workshop leader thing is nothing for you. If you have them, be yourself and just ask.

Here are some strategies that work for me.

• Be stupid. Don't be a smart ass. Even if you already know all of it, let the participants be the stars. They are the experts.


• Ask what you know. Start for example with asking something you already know. Tell something you know is not correct. Try to get the attention and see who corrects what. Most of the time it gives you some glimpse of stakes.


• Repeat. If some one tells you what, just repeat what he said, but using different words. In this way, you can get similarity in words used.


• Ask 5 times. Ask five times why. That will give you the highest level of reason. Ask 5 times how, and it will bring you to the lowest level of operation.

While the workshop leader is going through the process from left to right and top to bottom, the scribe should record all the statements made. Every statement should have a label who said it. In distribution of the statements, and, later on, the requirements, the name should always appear. This will keep people committed to what they said. If they just yell something, and their name is attached to it, the will be more careful what to say.

At the end of each day, for example, at least at the end of the workshop, the statements should be reviewed by the participants and be approved. Group statements together by subject, try to rephrase them with the participants so that they use the same 'language' and try to avoid, or at least clarify, conflicting statements. The last action is to mark statements as requirement, and try to establish some priorities in them. A mechanism often used is to classify requirements as 'must-have', 'nice-to-have' and 'oh-well-this-is-just-a-suggestion'.

I stated in the beginning of this section, the purpose of the workshop is to establish requirements on the end result of the project (the product, which may also include organizational issues and procedures). However, some times statements are made on the way the project will be conducted (the process). Create a separate list for these statements, and provide them to project management for consideration. But make sure you tell the workshop participants that these process-statements are treated differently.