Methods for Facilitating Project Management Workshops

In the past, there was one primary method for delivering facilitated project management training: the traditional training room, where facilitator and workshop participants interacted during the training activities. In today’s world of “virtual everything,” you have additional platforms for interaction with workshop participants over time and distance. In each of the three methods listed below, your role as facilitator remains much the same as it is in the training room: to act as a guide throughout the workshop and to promote participant interaction and shared understanding.

METHOD ONE: LIVE INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS

This is the kind of facilitated training everyone has experienced. Here you have at your disposal all the traditional tools of a skilled facilitator. You can read facial expressions and body language, observe team interaction during exercises, and intervene immediately if the training appears to veer off-course. Class discussions and debriefings occur in real-time so everyone stays “on the same page” as the workshop progresses. In an ideal world, all workshops might be live interactive ones with all participants in the same room with the instructor. However, today you may need to find creative alternatives to live training, trying as much as possible to mimic the kinds of facilitation that come naturally in the training room.

METHOD TWO: REAL-TIME VIRTUAL WORKSHOPS

Virtual training has been around for a number of years in the form of video conferencing. This kind of training was once only available to organizations with access to facilities with specialized phone lines and cable connections. Today, however, virtual training platforms include Web-based conferencing. Typically these platforms allow you as facilitator to interact with audience participants who are logged into your workshop on a set day at a set time for a session ranging from half an hour to several hours in length. Your interaction with the audience usually consists of questions to and from the audience at various points within the presentation. Usually, your presentation (almost always in PowerPoint) is the focal point of the discussion as each participant sees your presentation slides shared over the Web. Questions and answers can be either in the form of spoken transmission over the audio connections for the presentation or in the form of “chat windows” where participants and facilitator enter typed questions and responses. You as facilitator can use such tools as instant polling of your audience (most platforms provide mechanisms for these), pausing frequently for Q&A, and carefully structured audience discussions using a mini-agenda on one of the slides in your presentation.

Although these kinds of online facilitated sessions may be useful for presenting introductory training, they tend to preclude a kind of interaction. For that reason, it’s important to reserve this method for short introduction or review sessions. (One of the great advantages of these sessions is the ease with which they can be recorded and played back over the Web after the initial live session has been completed. However, if you intend to record the session, you may actually want to minimize some of the interactive elements because they will often lose relevance to subsequent viewers.)

METHOD THREE: FACILITATED ASYNCHRONOUS VIRTUAL WORKSHOPS

This method of training—a specialized application of e-learning—may be the single most effective means of delivering project management training outside the traditional training room. Don’t be frightened off by the rather daunting terminology. Each of the four words has significance:

Facilitated. In much of e-learning, the primary interaction is between the learner and the online learning content. Here, however, you as facilitator continue to maintain an important role in guiding and interpreting the learning process, facilitating team discussions and activities, and orchestrating lessons learned and debriefing. You create and sustain a virtual learning community throughout the duration of the workshop.

Asynchronous. Asynchronous training does not require participants to be online at a prescribed time or in general to interact with others in the workshop in real time. They are able to choose their own participation times. Frequently, asynchronous training means that learning can occur at any time for as long as the training is available on the online platform. In facilitated asynchronous training, however, training participants work in a learning community and cover the same content within a prescribed timeframe (usually a one-week period), during which team members and the facilitator interact using email and threaded discussions. In purely asynchronous workshops, chat and other real-time features are merely optional, so that participants have maximum flexibility for participation during each of the timeframes that make up the workshop agenda. Most often, team activities are accomplished using some combination of email, threaded discussions, online chat, and teleconferencing. Participants then share the results of those real-time activities with the entire group in the form of documents, PowerPoint presentations, and other workshop deliverables that can be shared on the online platform for the class.

Virtual. Just as “asynchronous” means that participants need not be together at specific times, “virtual” means that the workshop walls extend as far as Web connections reach; that is, almost anywhere. As your audience spreads around the globe, it becomes even more important to minimize requirements for participation at specific hours of the day. Global conference calls too often require someone (and it might be you) to get up in the middle of the night to participate in the call. Try to set up your course activities in such a way that few, if any, such calls are necessary.

Workshops. Unless there are individual and team activities that occur during the course of the training, you are not really delivering a workshop. Make sure your virtual workshops include both topical discussions, lessons learned, and activities requiring team collaboration. Be creative in coming up with additional ideas for promoting group interaction in a virtual environment.

Article added at: 11.09.2006 by Sally Jordan