Facilitation: Making the Difficult Seem Easy

The Oxford English Dictionary ‚ s primary definitions of ‚“facilitate ‚½ provide a veritable checklist for what makes a truly great facilitator:

1. 1. trans. To render easier the performance of (an action), the attainment of (a result); to afford facilities for, promote, help forward (an action or process).

   2. To make easier or less abstruse; to simplify. Obs. rare.

2. To lessen the labour of, assist (a person).

In fact, living up to the two portions of this definition might even be said to be the ultimate purpose of training in general. As a project management workshop facilitator, your long- and short- term objectives include:

• Making it easier to obtain project management training. This part of your role as project management training facilitator begins from the moment you make the commitment to deliver the training. You help make training available to the broadest possible audience by:

  • ‚“Feeling the pain ‚½ within your organization and responding with an initial plan to deliver project management training to help address perceived knowledge gaps

  • Finding support to fund and sponsor the project management training activities

  • Selling other managers and employees on the concept that time spent in project management training will benefit them and the entire organization

  • Making training available at times and locations that allow the optimal number of employees to participate

  • Simplifying the registration and confirmation process so that learners and their managers can easily arrange to attend the workshops

  • Reminding attendees of upcoming training events to minimize no-shows.

Each of these activities makes project management training more accessible and more inviting , while at the same time removing some of the common barriers to enrollment ‚ such as lack of line management support for the training effort and employee resistance to bureaucratic registration procedures.

• Working with your organization to set and meet training goals. Often, organizations simply know that they need something but have difficulty in defining exactly what they expect from project management training. In chapter 3, you examined some methods of getting to the real, most pressing project management training needs in your organization. Your ability to interact, ask probing questions, listen well, and help clarify and interpret learning requirements will facilitate the often difficult task of identifying the organization ‚ s true training requirements.

• Provide physical facilities and materials so that learning can take place. Sometimes we ‚ re so engaged in the lofty business of defining learning objectives and designing elaborate long-term curricular goals that we forget that, for learning to take place, our workshop participants will need tables, chairs, pens, instructional materials, and ready access to snacks and washroom facilities. Failure to plan for these rather mundane but essential items can turn the best-designed workshop into an episode of Survivor .

• Accelerate the learning process by simplifying and clarifying difficult concepts. Project management is a vast subject, and the depth of knowledge in the area continues to expand. There are numerous programs offering an M.B.A. in project management and even a few Ph.D. programs. Our one- and two-day workshops cannot pretend to compete with these programs, yet there are numerous topics in project management that must be covered to prepare our participants for managing projects. We ‚ ll need to be creative in finding ways to introduce these topics without ‚“dumbing them down ‚½ too much. When some project management trainers have tried to cram an excessive amount of detail into a short learning experience, the results usually have been less than satisfactory. This book follows Mies van der Robe ‚ s famous dictum that ‚“less is more. ‚½ We ‚ ll strive for simplicity and rely on a few good examples that our participants can apply in exercises to help make clear some of the key areas in project management. As facilitator, you ‚ ll want to develop your own set of analogies and explanations to help illustrate points. The more of these in your repertoire , the better job you ‚ ll be able to do in making the difficult seem easy.

• Further accelerate the process by promoting team learning and hands-on practice. Through the introduction of group learning exercises, you can effectively take advantage of the diversity of knowledge in your workshops and ensure that participants learn not just from the materials presented but ‚ by working together on applications of project management techniques ‚ from one another as well.

• Helping learners reach closure about what they ‚ ve learned through debriefing and other facilitation techniques. By seeing to it that every major learning activity includes the sharing of discoveries and lessons learned, you help solidify new learning and set the stage for building on it in the future. By leading debriefing discussions after learning activities, supplementing exercises with short self-assessment tools, and continuing to ask ‚“What ‚ s next ? ‚½ you ‚ ll reinforce learning and help participants view their acquisition of project management knowledge as an ongoing process.

• Provide performance support mechanisms after the training is over. You further facilitate project management learning through the provision of post-workshop resources to support your project managers and team members in applying their project management training after completing the workshops. These might include ‚“alumni newsletters ‚½ featuring project management tips and announcements about upcoming training opportunities, intranet discussion forums centered around project management issues, online tools and templates, links to project management resources, refresher presentations, and other means.