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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project LeadersCollaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders

Learn More Buy

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project LeadersCollaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders

Learn More Buy

Determining the Participants

Once you have a clearly articulated purpose, you can now determine who the intended participants are. To guide a team in working collaboratively, help them value their time by being clear about a purpose and how each participant can contribute to that purpose. Begin by determining:

  • Who plans to attend—Usually there is an initial set of attendees you or your sponsor has in mind.
  • Who needs to attend—These lists don’t necessarily coincide! You may learn that some named attendees have no clear reason for attending, while some key roles may be missing representation.
  • Why they are attending—Just as you focus a meeting on a clear purpose, focus the list of attendees on why each is attending and how he or she is contributing.

In short, a successful collaborative team has all the right people in the room in order to make a sustainable, actionable set of decisions.

My Anecdote

I was involved in the planning of a very large Release Planning meeting and began by interviewing the executive sponsor about her purpose and objectives. So far, so good. I then started asking about the attendee list, explaining that I needed to be able to interview attendees about their needs with regard to the meeting. In talking with the executive sponsor, I started to learn that the attendee list was massive! Attendees seemed to fall into one of three categories: those people who had subject matter expertise and could drive decisions, those people whose managers had demanded that they be allowed to attend, and those people whom the executive sponsor felt she had to invite for fear of offending another group.

In these latter two groups, I could see that no one was empowered to make decisions; people were required to attend, and yet their attendance didn’t ensure that they could make decisions. To get the sponsor’s attention about this problem, I tried to delve into what each of their roles would be in the planning. This was unclear. I kept returning to the stated purpose of the meeting and its intended benefits. In this context, I urged her to reevaluate the role of each participant.

I worked with the meeting sponsor for a week to help her edit the list and make the purpose of attending the meeting very clear and very directed. Ultimately, we managed to reduce the attendee list by almost 50%.

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