Workshop Phases

Beginning of the Workshop

Encourage Stakeholders.
Early workshop activities should give stakeholders confidence to engage in the workshop.
Establish the focus of the workshop (i.e. issues analysis)
Encourage trust (nurture collaborative environment)
Help stakeholders interact with each other.
Early activities establish the forum for deliberation.

Middle of the Workshop

Engage Stakeholders
Mid-workshop activities should develop stakeholder understanding of the problem.
Stakeholders are given activities to reveal their understanding to everyone.
Experiential Learning usually works.
Facilitator must limit their own interventions to ensure stakeholders are learning.

End of the Workshop

Activities at the end should ensure the workshop has consequence.
Actions should be agreed and assigned.
Actions are defined, assigned to stakeholders and given a timescale for the completion.

Causes of Facilitation Failure

Process Failure - due to design & management of the workshop.
Content Failure - facilitator failed to interpret the stakeholders' emerging discussions and did not steer the worksop appropriately.
Competence Failure - facilitator does not have the skills or appreciate the need to fulfil all their obligations.
External Failure - due to stakeholders bring allegiances/coalitions into the workshop which the facilitator failed to recognise & control
Scope Facilitator - facilitator's failure to fully appreciate the nature of the problem, causing them to undertake a workshop that examines in too much or too little detail.
Selection Failure - due to the selection of facilitator whose expertise are inappropriate for the task.

Approaches to Facilitation

Heron's Facilitation Models

Six dimensions of facilitation.
Three modes of facilitation.
Six types of interventions in workshops.

Effective Facilitation Requires:

Emotional Intelligence - To understand stakeholders.
Interpersonal Intelligence - To understand stakeholders.
Intra-personal Intelligence - To make workshop interventions.

Heron's 6 Dimensions of Facilitation

Behaviours the facilitator can adopt:

Planning - how can stakeholders identify their objectives?
Meaning - how can stakeholders understand, make sense and assign meaning to what is going on?
Confronting - how can stakeholders expose undesirable realities/overcome their own resistance?
Feeling - how can stakeholder emotions be managed and used?
Structuring - what activities and workshop structures are going to be used and what opportunities do stakeholders have to learn?
Valuing - how can a supporting workshop environment be established and what is required for stakeholders to consider their participation worthwhile?

Heron's 3 Modes of Facilitation

3 ways to facilitate a workshop process:

Hierarchical

Facilitator power dominates.
Facilitator decides how the activities will be implemented.
Facilitator is responsible for workshop performance.

Cooperative

Facilitator power collaborates.
Task goals are negotiated with stakeholders.
Facilitator guides stakeholders through activities.

Autonomous

Facilitator power enables.
Group activity is delegated, autonomous and self-directed.
Social capital has been established.
Stakeholders are confident in their own capabilities.

Heron's 6 Categories of Intervention

Facilitative Interventions:

Supportive - seeks to affirm the worth & relevance of every stakeholder (e.g. listening, empathy...)
Catalytic - helping stakeholders to discover for themselves (e.g. proving, testing...)
Cathartic - helping stakeholders to overcome barriers to progression or insight (e.g. supporting, encouraging...)

Authoritative Interventions:

Confronting - supporting stakeholders but also highlight issues they may have missed (e.g. prompting, questioning...)
Informative - conveying information to stakeholders (e.g. seeding, bias?)
Prescriptive - directing stakeholders' engaging in the process but without influencing it's content (e.g. guiding, enabling...)

Summary of Types of VM Workshops

To be considered a study of value, a workshop must examine the problem in functional terms. Only once a problem has be characterised using function analysis can a solution be developed. The solution becomes value-adding if it reflects the client's value system.

VM workshops are undertaken at specification points in a project so their insights inform critical construction activities.

As the project progresses, the design becomes more fixed and the ability to address value reduces. The scope of problems changes from whole-project issues to system specific engineering problems. The nature of stakeholders in workshops also changes from those concerned with the whole building to those concerned with it's technical stages.

VMO - Confirms the project is probably the most appropriate response to the procuring client's strategic needs.
VM1 - Elicits the tactical project stakeholders' value system and functional requirements to inform feasibility study, briefing and conceptual design.
VM2 - Verifies concept design against evolving requirements.
VM3 - Final design verification before detail design commences.
VM4 - Sometimes performed to address problems within the overall project and those within individual technical systems where value can still be added even after the cut-off point for the whole project.

Applied Value Engineering Workshops

Are ad-hoc workshops to determine solutions to difficulties/problems being faced.
Workshops led and facilitated by the contractor.
Most likely involve the contractor's suppliers and subcontractors.
Continue to use the same analytical methods to understand the relationship between functionality and cost (i.e. value)
Often facilitated by a project team member.
A structured AVE workshop would create a forum for technical expertise associated with the problem to discuss in a socially safe space potential innovative solutions that would genuinely improve value rather than simply reducing cost, scope or specification whilst also reflecting relevant stakeholders values.
Applying a structured workshop approach to AVE would cause it to become Real Value Engineering.

The 40 Hour Workshop

Is impractical
Too long
Too expensive
Too difficult to sustain engagement.
To difficult to coordinate diaries.

A shorter form of workshop is typically used in UK Value Management Practice.

The UK Charette VM Practice

Is a shorter, more adaptable approach.
Typically 1-1.5 days.
Still includes: per-workshop information, analysis & synthesis in the workshop & post-workshop idea implementation.
Still focused on the front-end of project definition & design.

The modern Charette adapts the 40 hour job plan to suit:

Timing of application.
Stakeholders involved.
Nature of the problem.
Time available.

	Created by d.moran-10 almost 12 years ago

Undergraduate Value Management & Engineering Note on Principles of Workshop Implementation, created by d.moran-10 on 02/06/2014.

Principles of Workshop Implementation