Engaging your audience

Ever felt your mind wandering in a workshop? Engaging people with project management is no mean feat, Clare Arnold and Suzi Lomax explains.

As soon as we try to cover anything project process-related we are met with glazed eyes. It also does not go down well when we have to deliver the news that people are carrying out project process activities incorrectly. The teams we work with include people from a scientific and software development background, and have not necessarily been exposed to formal project management before.

In an attempt to create more understanding and to familiarise people with project processes, our company project workshops had been running for some time. They had been run very much as sit-and-listen exercises and attendance had been waning. The running of the workshops was handed to us and we realised we had to spice them up a bit.

Challenges  
We faced a number of challenges arranging the workshops, one being to increase attendance from the waning attendance record of workshops in the past.

Rather than continuing to call the sessions ‘project workshops’, we decided to create an element of intrigue, so sent meeting invitations out entitled ‘Surprise party’, ‘Is that your final answer?’ and ‘Bert the builder’. The titles attracted people’s attention and they became inquisitive, but we avoided answering any questions before the sessions.

The intrigue helped and more people attended, so we now faced the new challenge of maintaining the higher level of attendance. We decided to inject an element of fun into the sessions (a challenge in itself) so people would continue coming back. We created fun scenarios to use as a basis for the sessions and they became interactive; no longer a time to sit and listen, but a time for people to get on their feet and get involved.

Working in an organisation that has very specialist areas – for example, science and areas that are not always understood by all – we felt we needed to make the workshops accessible and appropriate to everyone.

To overcome this challenge we ran themes during the workshops, hoping to engage attendees by drawing on experiences they are familiar with in everyday life. Who hasn’t built houses out of building blocks at some point in their life? Who hasn’t watched TV? We tried to connect this experience to the workshop task, using familiar children’s toys and game shows.

When delivering the workshops, we wanted to ensure they were worthwhile and that people did not just attend, then forget everything when they left the room. We were determined to get people to apply their new knowledge in their everyday project work.

Research shows that having fun when learning results in information being retained. Psychologist Daniel Goleman notes in his book Emotional Intelligence, “Laughter… seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely.” By injecting humour, getting them involved and ensuring people had fun – including some laughter – we succeeded. Of course, feeding them chocolate and cakes also helped!

Topics
There were a number of topics that we wanted to tackle during the workshops, including: risk management, roles and responsibilities, and requirements.

Risk management - During project meetings we review the project RAID log (risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies) and, on the whole, we were generally being met with a wall of silence and open resistance to suggesting any new items or to review and update progress on items that had been identified.

The team members did not appear to appreciate the value of managing risks, so we set up a surprise-party-themed workshop to demonstrate the benefits. We were true to our word and themed our workshop as a party with balloons, food, music and a comedy party scenario. We set the attendees the task of carrying out risk management when planning a surprise party.

Roles and responsibilities - In the process of carrying out project retrospectives, it was becoming clear that people did not understand who was responsible for certain aspects of the project, and the same questions of roles and responsibilities were being asked over and over.

In an attempt to clear up any confusion, we ran a spoof quiz session based on the popular TV show where contestants answer questions building up to a £1,000,000 prize. The topic of the questions was based on project roles and responsibilities, but the delivery was far less ordinary.

By basing the session on a familiar quiz format we created a fun and informative session. There were even handmade props for ‘phone a friend’ and ‘ask the audience’, and people really enjoyed making use of these.

Requirements - As an organisation running projects we had a habit of setting off on development without fully knowing what we were setting out to achieve.

The importance of requirements seemed to be lost on some people, so we established a building-themed workshop where the importance of requirements was demonstrated. The group was split into small teams, each team having a nominated foreman, and they had to build a house from plastic bricks following set requirements.

This workshop also demonstrated the importance of change control, as we made last-minute changes to the requirements. Getting people to work together was a great team-building activity and we even helped the participants to think about the project life-cycle and the importance of planning during the initiation stage.

A few questions to finish  
Did we achieve what we set out to do? Did we address the problems? Did people learn and understand?

Across projects we have seen a marked change in the acceptance of following process and a real buy-in of the benefits of formal risk management. Project team members are referring to project documents such as the RAID log without being prompted. They are no longer a tick-box exercise; they are being used as a useful project tool.

The sessions were well received and we received some very positive feedback. People appreciated the effort we had made to make these different and it was a change from a third-party trainer – they were trained by someone who knew the projects and could give real working examples specific to the organisation that participants could understand.

We are now left with the challenge of maintaining our reputation, as we have become known in the organisation as the people to put a bit of pizazz into training. So the next time you are planning a workshop or presentation – shake off the cobwebs, get your creative juices flowing and make the ordinary less ordinary.  

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Clare Arnold and Suzi Lomax are project managers at Lhasa, a Leedsbased educational not-for-profit charity specialising in life sciences software