How can project design help manage conflicts in large group facilitation?

One thing that I have found helpful is that besides clearly defining the purpose and scope of any project, by defining the main goal of the project, describing the boundaries and limitations, measuring the progress and impact, it is key to involve people in the development of the project. Involving people allows for invisible boundaries to be cleared away, it helps to increase collaboration and cooperation, and most important of all, people own the project when they are involved. The best way is to first organize a kick-off meeting where people acknowledge the importance of the project. More importantly, it is paramount to also develop a change management strategy that allows people to accept change rather than resist to it.

This is related to what I mentioned in the previous section. However, identifying and engaging stakeholders is not enough. We also need to manage them by understanding what power of influence they have in the project and what is the interest they have in it. It is relatively clear how we should manage stakeholders with high power and high interest. But the key is to be able to have those with low interest becoming high-interest stakeholders. This way, we will have more people supporting the project and providing more resources. It is also important to find those who are detractors and convert them into promoters. This way, we remove roadblocks and the project will run seamlessly.

Methods and tools are important. However, they will not provide a positive impact by themselves. What we also need to consider here is the culture that the group has. If the culture of the organization is not open to change, there is little incentive to get out of the comfort zone and there is no space for learning, then, it would be difficult to progress with any type of project. So, before selecting tools and methods, we need to prepare the organization for change. This implies talking to the leadership and finding out what problems they have, what are their expectations, how mature is their organization to plan and to drive change. After all this, then we can speak about methods and tools to facilitate any other work.

A great tool that I always use to mitigate risk is called Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA). It is a tool that helps to calculate a Risk Priority Number (RPN) which takes into account three key components: 1) Severity (S) of the problem, 2) frequency of Occurrence (O), and 3) Detection ability (A). The RPN is then calculated by multiplying S x O x A. This will provide an index that will help prioritize which risk has the highest severity, the highest frequency of occurrence, and the lowest ability to be detected. With this information we can create a mitigation and prevention plan and then measure RPN after this plan has been implemented. This will help to manage risk in a practical way.

A great way to gather feedback is through the us of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric. Even though, NPS is originally a measure of customer loyalty, it can also be used to measure feedback from a project. At the end, stakeholders can also be loyal to the project. The positive side of NPS is that it is simple. A score of 9 or 10 show stakeholders that promote the project, 8 o 9 show stakeholders that are not sure about what to think and 6 or below show detractors. Thus, it becomes easier to evaluate the feedback provided and create strategies to tackle each type of feedback.