Project Planning Workshop Activities

Dixit Braamcamp. Turning a boardgame into a co-design tool for citizen participation in local development

Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a “postmortem” to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming.

A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful.

Dragon Dreaming is a process for creating and achieving collective dreams, which involves four phases: dreaming, planning, doing, and celebrating.

A SWOT Analysis is used in project planning, strategic planning and other processes where agreement is needed about the current situation of a project, team, department or organization. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Determine the gap between the present situation and a desired future state

This process is used to aid in planning projects by showing all activities that have to take place in the chronological order so as to reach a goal.

When exploring an information space, it’s important for a group to know where they are at any given time. By using SQUID, a group charts out the territory as they go and can navigate accordingly. SQUID stands for Sequential Question and Insight Diagram.

 The exercise allows teams to examine multiple aspects of an event or project in order to form original ideas on how it can be enhanced in the future. Break free from the barriers of boring retrospective analysis strategies to discover how you can make your next project, meeting, conference a success.

This game has been designed to gather facts and opinions from the participants on different aspects of the issue at stake. It will help gain and share insight from all points of view, since everyone will have had the chance to contribute.

Personal Kanban is a tool for organizing your work to be more efficient and productive. It is based on agile methods and principles.

With Who/What/When matrix, you can connect people with clear actions they have defined and have committed to.

This is a method for individuals and teams to define the structure, direction and first steps of a project. The individual or team works through a set of questions and documents the answers in a sharable digital format. This can either be a “living” document that develops with the project it can be left as just a clear and concise record of the starting-point.