Chris recently had the pleasure of facilitating a lunchtime workshop as part of PMI Silicon Valley and SDForum's Tools & Techniques series. A group of 23 Project Managers turned out to discuss "The Most Effective Tools & Techniques For Project Managers" using the Group Wisdom Without Groupthink (GWG) structured brainstorming method.
GWG begins with a round-robin survey of the entire group to elicit ideas, which are posted on the wall. Next, participants vote for the items they think most important and the results are arranged in tiers. Here are the results:
| Tier 1: 11-15 votes |
| Web conference tools |
| Well-defined metrics |
| Dashboards |
| Scope management |
| Project meeting w/agenda |
| Proactive risk management |
| Brainstorming session |
| Project stage gate reviews w/all key sponsors |
| Face-to-face kick-off |
| Fist-of-five |
| Tier 2: 6-10 votes |
| Management by walking around |
| Status reports |
| Repeatable release process |
| MS Excel |
| Sharepoint |
| Resource management |
| Stakeholder management |
| Tier 3: 1-5 votes |
| Tools for change management |
| Resource allocation matrix (RAM) |
| Portfolio management |
| Acknowledge success |
| Post-meeting buffer |
| Work breakdown |
| Social collaboration |
| Effective open-ended questions |
| Process workflow w/visio |
| Requirements trackability |
| Setting team ground rules |
| Weekly status for subject matter experts (SMEs) |
| Short-term goals |
| MS Project |
| Adaptive project management |
| Project dream list |
| Case complete |
| Version control tools |
| Quindi |
| Managing up |
| Determine costs of being late |
| Global collaboration – video |
| Tier 4: 0 votes |
| User contextual inquiries |
| Preview of materials |
| Groove |
| Going down a rat hole |
| Skype |
| Scrum meetings |
Group Wisdom Without Groupthink works well with all kinds of groups, both technical and non, but clearly the project managers had a special affinity for the exercise, as participants rated it an average of 4.75 out of five, leaving comments like, "a very useful technique that I can implement
right away."
Here is a similar workshop Chris ran on the topic of What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or fail)? at Agile Open California 2008.