Use of MeetingSphere ranges from in-house project managers and business analysts of Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies to ‘big-four’ consultancies. Free-lance project management professionals and business analysts add global reach to their work with MeetingSphere Pro. MeetingSphere Portable Servers are used where the Internet does not reach or must not reach for security reasons.
Because requirements are invariably a critical input in project management, delays in establishing the requirements baseline almost inevitably extend the critical path. Running these workshops online not only cuts costs and effort but also cycle time dramatically.
Inclusivity. Being able to write instead of having to speak to a group facilitates the inclusion of those with a more introvert personality as well as those participants who feel at a disadvantage because the meeting language is not their mother tongue. Writing a contribution is far less stressful then having to make one’s case to an audience that may be impatient or hostile.
Interactivity. In MeetingSphere meetings, contributions by default are immediately visible to everyone. This enables participants to balance statements they don’t agree with by a direct response, by asking a question or by asking for more information. It also allows for detail and comments to be added as well as responses answered where in a conventional setting, the ‘microphone’ would have passed on with relevant comments left unsaid and questions unanswered.
In summary, with MeetingSphere workspaces, project managers and business analysts gather a more comprehensive and balanced list of requirements more easily and faster than is possible with conventional techniques. Participants are engaged on a level playing field before decision rules are applied, which increases their acceptance and commitment to the results.
Simultaneous input, enabling everyone to contribute at the same time.
Working in parallel on a range of topics, allowing participants to focus on requirements they are interested in or to which they have something to contribute.
Transparency of information, by providing access to all relevant items for review, comment or questions for the duration of the activity.
Rating and prioritizing requirements in real time, which helps to keep lists manageably short and participants to be able to focus on items that matter.
Use of prompts (or questions), ensuring that important aspects are covered and analyzed for each item, for instance, the interrelatedness (or conflict) with other requirements, or alternative requirements, or indicators of success, or the link to business needs or whatever the project team must know about that category of requirement.
With MeetingSphere’s Rating workspace, facilitators of requirements gathering workshops can ask participants to rate any list of items on one or several criteria.
Each rating on any criterion will instantly produce a results table and, if wanted, the same results in chart format. The results will immediately identify top-scoring items and the items that nobody finds worthy of further attention. Results also show high normalized standard deviation as red flags.
In some cases, it is enough to know that there is controversy over a requirement. In other cases, one may wish to know whether dissent runs across the whole group or between specific groups of stakeholders, which can be seen if ratings are tagged by ‘team’ (a chosen demography).
In many cases, business analysts and project management professionals find that it pays to invest time to dig deeper by using MeetingSphere’s Discussion workspace. In the Discussion tool, participants can discuss multiple controversial items in parallel, either anonymously, or with team tags or individually named, as appropriate. Questions such as “Why can’t we agree on the importance of these requirements?” or “How could we reach consensus?” quickly reveal the interests and assumptions causing disagreement.
Conflicting assumptions are often resolved directly in the discussion. Conflicting interests can be addressed as appropriate in or after the meeting or can be noted in the stakeholder register for future consideration.
All stakeholders are not created equal. This is true for most projects where a stakeholder analysis has mapped stakeholders precisely by their power and interest or by similar grids. MeetingSphere helps to implement the decision rules which reflect these inequalities.
If the group in the workshop is empowered to make decisions, participants usually do so after rating the relevant items on the relevant criteria. If certain groups have a veto, or certain quorums must be reached, such rules can be implemented by tagging ratings with the name of that group. Ratings can be weighted, aggregated, compared and filtered as required in real time, transparently, in the meeting.
If the group is to inform the decisions of decision makers who may or may not have participated in the workshop, that information will be richer and more structured than the outcomes of a conventional workshop. MeetingSphere’s Rating workspace aggregates data as needed. When decisions are made after the workshop is over, analysts can also export the data to Excel to analyze and present the data to decision makers as required.
Successful meeting and workshop agendas can be saved as templates, accelerating the setup of future workshops dramatically. PMOs use templates to spread best practice throughout the organization.
For follow-up processing, presenting and analyzing in other tools, the facilitator can export the data as an Excel file. A full report is available instantly as a Word document.
The Word report is verbatim, offering opportunities of investigation traditional workshop documentation does not provide. For instance, to investigate the sources of dissent, one can refer to the report to review the arguments given in the discussions that preceded and/or followed the rating.