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Alumni often tell us how much Gary has changed their lives. The skills they learned in his class helped them become successful Facilitators, improve productivity at work, and become Collaborative Leaders.
Making the Case for Facilitation and Facilitators
Organizations are cutting back in resources, laying off people and asking those who remain to do more with less. On the surface, this certainly makes the numbers look good – but is it the right approach? Organizations need to make the most effective use of their resources and human capital is the most important resource they have.
- Meetings – Meetings are notoriously unproductive. In 1986, Roger Mosvik and Robert Nelson surveyed Fortune 500 companies and found that managers lost 240 hours a year in unproductive meetings. This translates to an average of $71 million per company per year.
- Projects – An IT project today easily costs more than $1 million and many are implemented with problems in quality creating poor relations between all stakeholders involved. Almost 2/3rd of all IT projects fail.
Making Employees Productive is Key
Businesses and organizations work smarter when facilitation skills are incorporated into their culture and employees develop Facilitator skills as part of their job. When companies develop facilitation skills, they:
- Save money – using facilitated workshops to gather requirements, develop plans, solve problems, and define new products, etc., result in a 20% to 40% reduction in effort.
- Save time – using facilitated workshops reduces the time to complete projects to ¼ the time. Consensus decision-making happens in a shorter time and is lasting.
- Increase quality – using facilitated workshops means fewer mistakes and changes down the road. Quality is enhanced because two heads are better than one taking advantage of the ideas of all people.
- Enhance communication – using facilitated workshops enhances communication between all people involved. Stakeholders communicate and, most importantly, listen.
- Increase Collaboration – using facilitated workshops creates an atmosphere of collaboration by engaging all people and giving them equal voice. Engagement is critical for consensus.
Using facilitated workshops provides additional benefits, engaging a greater portion of an organization:
- Increases the number of ideas an organization has to work with, enabling tremendous innovation. In-flight Internet was developed in a facilitated workshop.
- Increases employee morale – people feel valued when asked to participate. The number one complaint from employees in employee satisfaction is the not knowing where they fit in the plans of their organization.
Metrics to Support the use of Facilitators
I have been asked if there are metrics to support the use of Facilitators. Yes, there are. I have participated in projects where productivity measurements were tracked. What we found was an average 4-to-1 increase in productivity. This has been consistent throughout industry and over the years – saving organizations millions of dollars a year.
A facilitated workshop produces 8 weeks of requirements gathering work in a 3-day workshop. Translated into dollars and cents, this means reducing the time to complete projects to one-fourth the time.
- If a Business Analyst makes $70,000 per year, then 8 weeks of requirements gathering costs $10,769. Using a 3-day facilitated workshop, the cost is $807. That means that using a 3-day workshop for requirements gathering saves over $9,961 for the one Business Analyst. When you include the actual number of Business Analysts along with the clients involved during the 8 weeks to gather requirements, the savings are even greater.
- The requirements gathering phase of an IT project is typically one-third the effort. That means that gathering requirements for a $1 million project costs $333,000. Using facilitated workshops to gather requirements cuts the time to one-fourth, saving almost $250,000. That amounts to one-fourth the cost of the entire project - just for requirements gathering.
- In addition, because the requirements are consensus-based and more complete, development time is reduced and quality increases adding to the savings.
Benefits of Training Employees
In addition to the benefits listed, training employees in effective Facilitation and Facilitator skills benefits an organization by giving them:
- Employees with skills that are transferable to any area within the organization.
- Employees inspiring collective action through collaborative Leadership.
- Employees with the necessary tools to continue to grow as a team.
Those who attend our FoCuSeD™ Facilitator Classes learn “how to”:
- Develop successful processes that enable a group of people to come together to accomplish a task.
- Get up in front of a group of people and speak with confidence.
- Not be in charge.
- Understand and work with a diverse group of people.
- Engage a group of people so that everyone gets involved.
- Move a group of people to consensus.
So
If your organization is looking to increase the productivity of its most important asset – human capital – then training employees in Facilitation and Facilitator skills is the most effective way for that to happen. Facilitation and Facilitator training pays for itself with the first workshop that an employee facilitates.
At a competitive price, our FoCuSeD™ training pays for itself, in improved productivity and quality.
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