Continuing on January's theme of 2008 New Year's resolutions, this week I will be looking at the next resolution on my list which is "Collaborate in '08". The idea of working together, sharing ideas, exploring possibilities and discovering solutions that break the mold.
In my experience as a Project Manager, I have been involved in a lot of brainstorming or affinity sessions and have accumulated a couple of tips and tricks which can make these sessions productive and successful.
Prepare
"By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail." ~ Benjamin Franklin
The key difference between a successful brainstorming session and an unsuccessful one is preparation. The planning for a session starts with bringing together the right combination of people. What I like to do when running a session is to invite at least one representative from each cycle of a project, from sales to design to networking, having a mixture of people from different fields, brings with it a mixture of ideas, perspectives, and ways of thinking. The next step in successful planning, is to set an agenda for your meeting, which accomplishes two things, it helps provide structure to your meeting as well as allow everyone to come prepared and ready to share.
Share
"Our best thoughts come from others." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, a successful brainstorming session is a result of bringing various and uniquely different people together in one room, the difficulty with this however, is making sure that all of those uniquely different voices, get heard. Specifically, this idea of overshadowing, is often seen when the people in the room have different ranks, for example a senior developer and a junior developer, or a graphic designer and a creative director. And so, in order to avoid the domination of voices or ideas, a nice approach is to have everyone write down their ideas on post-it notes (this can either be done prior to the meeting or during the first couple of minutes of the meeting), which allows everyone to freely express themselves without worry of judgment.
Organize
"Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up." ~ A.A. Milne
Now that everyone has written down their individual ideas, the next step is to start organizing and prioritizing. A nice approach to this process of organizing is to have each person present their ideas in front of the entire team and then start placing the ideas into groups. The benefit of using post-it notes for this process, is that as the various members of the session go through their ideas, you can literally pickup and reorganize the ideas into different groups. Once everyone has presented, you will begin to see common themes evolve, with the various ideas acting as tactics to accomplish a larger goal.
The biggest challenge that I faced transitioning from the educational world to the professional one, was the need to rewire myself from being a one woman show to working together as a team. But what I've found over the years, is that it is only through true collaboration and teamwork, that we can reach our utmost potential.
