In Practice: A Kickoff Workshop Gem

Frowin Fajtak, an experienced facilitator and the senior quality manager for an IT business, shares his story about a successful liftoff. He describes how establishing a common sense of purpose contributed to team commitment and product success. By implementing this best practice, the liftoff prepared team members for the work to come. He also highlights the involvement of executive sponsors in making the liftoff a success.

Welcome the Participants

“Welcome to our department headquarters! Welcome to our workshop!”

With these words, product sponsor Bernhard welcomed the fourteen members of his new team, whom he chose during the three weeks prior to the event.

“The two days that we are going to spend together will give us the chance to get to know one another in person, bring everybody to the same knowledge level, clarify open issues, and make our team ready for work in a very short time.”

“To make sure that we will be able to focus on the work ahead of us in the best possible way, I have invited Frowin to facilitate this workshop for us. In his capacity as senior quality manager, he is familiar with our processes and our everyday business. As a long-term facilitator with international experience, he always is the first choice for me when it comes to designing our workshops.”

Two weeks before, Bernhard had asked me to support him during the preparation and conduct of this kickoff workshop. He himself was a renowned customer consultant for the software platform. It was a prestige project for the most important customer of Bernhard’s department. They were to perform an extensive upgrade of the platform and meet a stringent deadline for the migration.

Pull the Team Together

Clemens, Bernhard’s manager, had moved heaven and earth to win this work for our division. Now that he had succeeded, the biggest problem was to get together a suitable team. Experts from four different departments who worked throughout Europe participated in this kickoff workshop. While participants from the same departments had at least a nodding acquaintance with one another, participants from across borders met for the first time.

Given these conditions and the fact that the team would be constantly working at the customer’s site in Germany during the next six months, I had easily persuaded Clemens and Bernhard to set aside two days for this kickoff workshop. Bernhard and I spent a few hours planning the agenda and coordinating the contents of presentations and speeches.

Then the day of the actual workshop arrived. While I felt quite comfortable in my usual role as facilitator, for Bernhard it was a first. He had to present himself as product sponsor to a team of fourteen equally accomplished experts. So I made a point of letting him speak the words of welcome and only then have him introduce me as facilitator. In this way it was clear right from the start that it was Bernard who was the leader in terms of the subject matter, while it was my task to create the setting for a successful workshop.

My introduction was concise and focused on the necessary facts: my name, experience, and role as facilitator. Before we started out, I asked the participants to stick to a few basic rules, which in my experience are a must for the success of these workshops.

“All mobile phones will be switched off. Messages can be listened to during breaks. I recommend that you answer only calls that are really important and absolutely urgent. Laptops may be used only during presentations. You can check and answer your email during the hour before dinner that is set aside for this purpose.”

I uncovered a flip chart where I had listed the goals of this kickoff workshop:

• Briefing team members about project history and current planning status

• Coordination of role assignment, work packages, and interfaces

• Information on processes, tools, and reporting structures

• Clarification of codes of conduct for customer contact

• Collecting of input for risk management purposes

• Getting to know one another and taking steps toward becoming a team

I explained the meaning of these goals for the team. When no one asked a question, I uncovered a flip chart showing a rough outline of the agenda. Only the start and end times of the two days of the workshop were stated as exact times—the rest of the time was roughly divided between presentations and work sessions, as well as coffee breaks, lunch, and dinner. It’s important to keep the timetable flexible. If the schedule was too rigid, important and necessary discussions might have been restricted. So following each speech, I reserved quite a large amount of time for questions and clarification.

Now, the most important framework conditions had been specified. The flip charts stating the goals and the agenda—as well as all the other workshop results—remained fixed to the wall during the entire workshop, visible to everybody.

The time had come to get everybody actively involved. All the important speeches had to wait until the essential had been achieved: we wanted everybody to get a feeling about who the other participants were and where every single member of this group of experts saw themselves in this group.

I started by asking the participants to gather in the rear of the room. In front we placed a table for the presenter, a projector, and three rows of seats with desks and a good view of the screen. The rear part of the room was for the interactive parts of the workshop: no tables, a few chairs near the wall, and flip charts and pin boards for group work.

“Please seek out someone whom you don’t know, or don’t know well, and introduce yourselves: name, role, education, and experience. Then answer two questions: what has been my biggest success in my job so far? What do you need to know about me so that we can work together successfully?”

Immediately after my starting signal, the participants approached each other and searched for suitable partners. The rising volume of voices signaled that everybody was interested in finding out more about yet unknown colleagues.

After several minutes I called the participants back and gave them a task they had to solve together: “Please form a circle organized in such a way that the person who has been working here the longest is positioned to the right of me, while the one who has been working here for the shortest amount of time is positioned to the left of me. All the others should be in ascending order from left to right.”

The team solved this task within a short time. Then I gave them the same task as in the beginning: introducing oneself to someone still unknown. This alternation between pairs getting to know each other and simple tasks for the entire team took place three times. The other group tasks were:

• Position yourself in the room corresponding your home location. (This was to make it clear who comes from which location.)

• Form groups of people who are interested in the same sport as you are. (This task made it possible for participants to find a first personal way to establish a relationship with other participants.)

Make the Business Case

Once everybody was seated again, the first presentation of slides began with management’s mandate to the team. Clemens, the responsible manager, had been present since the start of the workshop. While he was preparing for his presentation, I distributed a handout with the slides of all presentations with enough space for personal notes.

I asked the participants to ask any questions immediately. If prolonged discussions should develop from these questions, I would interrupt and note down open issues on a flip chart. This helped ensure that presentations did not end up in endless discussions. It also helped me monitor the time planned for the individual presenter and, if necessary, to remind them to stick to it.

Clemens needed only four slides and fifteen minutes. His speech focused on:

• The history of the relationship between our company and the customer

• The meaning of the product for our strategy in this technology and customer segment

• Concrete follow-up orders and potential sales that could be won if our product turned out to be successful

Clemens’ presentation had the intended effect: the faces of the participants clearly showed that everyone was aware of the superior importance of the task ahead. After answering a few questions, Clemens left, announcing that he would come again at the end of the workshop. He ended with the words, “And now I entrust you, Bernhard, with the responsibility for this project. I wish you and everyone on the team much success!”

Everybody now was curious about the next presentation, in which Bernhard outlined the organization, the plan, and how the pieces of the puzzle would finally fit together to form the overall picture:

• Who contributes what kind of know-how?

• Who takes over which tasks, and where are the most important interfaces within the team?

• Who are our contact persons on the customer side?

• What are the constraints derived from the plan and the schedule?

Participants asked a lot of questions during this presentation, but we added only three open issues.

For lunch, we had booked a large private table at the company. During lunch, it became obvious how important breaks spent together are to give participants the chance for discussions outside the fixed agenda and workshop structure.

The getting-to-know-each-other session in the beginning had already provided team members with points of reference which were followed up. Some positive tension and pleasant anticipation could be sensed, which Clemens and Bernhard had triggered with their presentations.

Get Down to Work

We started the afternoon with an interactive work session, where the participants split up in small groups based on their work specialty, such as analysis or implementation. Each group had to describe its interfaces with other groups: what do we need from you to be able to work efficiently? What do we supply to you so that you can fulfill your task?

In the following discussions, it became clear that each subteam would only be successful if supported by the other subteams. Therefore the conclusion wasn’t too surprising: it is not the outstanding performance of individual experts that counts, but the joint success of the entire team!

After an extended coffee break, we arrived at the last focus point of the first day. When preparing the workshop, Bernhard and I had chosen the topic of customer interface for this time in the workshop. Potential problems that might arise working in a large team at the customer site were a critical topic. We thought it was important to make the team members aware of the risk involved. Because I have given presentations and seminars on this subject repeatedly at our company, I slipped out of the role of facilitator at this point and gave a short speech on the basic principles of claim management.

Bernhard followed by presenting the customer’s organization chart, which he used to explain who would be the customer contact persons and who had what decision-making authority. As some of the participants already had worked for this customer in the past, my next question was rather obvious: “Who knows some of the people involved and what are your experiences with them?” A lively sharing of experiences followed, and in the end everybody seemed to know who could be expected to act cooperatively and who had to be handled with care.

We spent the evening together in a nice traditional restaurant. On choosing the restaurant, Bernhard and I had made sure that all participants would be seated at one table, where we would have some privacy. This made it possible for the participants to swap stories about their experiences as engineers and consultants, to discuss the work at hand, or just to enjoy the local culinary treats and the culture of the location that had won this exciting commission.

Focus on Quality

The morning of the second day started again with a presentation. Kurt, who was responsible for the quality management, outlined important issues of quality assurance: rules for controlling and reporting; tools and configuration management; filing structure for documents; and templates and guidelines.

These topics gave rise to a lot of questions, but Kurt and Bernhard handled most of them.

After a short coffee break, we dedicated ourselves to the topic of risk management. The bottom line was to make all team members aware of the risks involved. First, we thought of potential risks that might arise in a member’s activities. After identifying these risks, we jointly completed the list with general risks that might endanger our success.

In the next step we set priorities. We marked particularly critical points with early identifiers, and defined prevention and emergency measures. In his function as the quality manager, Kurt used the result from this work session as a first input for the risk list, which had to be dealt with as a fixed item on the agenda in the jour fixe (a recurring reporting meeting, which was to take place at regular intervals).

The responsible management team joined us for our lunch in the company restaurant. Department manager Clemens and the responsible financial manager soon were drawn into discussions.

The afternoon started with a short statement by the financial manager, who once again drew our attention to the economic importance of this product. Afterward, we dealt with the list of open items. Clemens was able to answer some of the questions. For the items that could not be clarified on the spot, we identified a responsible party to follow up on the problem afterwards.

SAPHIR Is Born

Clemens wanted to end the workshop with a special highlight: finding a name for the work effort. While there was an official name supplied by the customer, it is quite common at our company to give internal names for our team work. I thought it was a splendid idea to end this kickoff workshop with a baptism. A lot of clever suggestions came up. After several rounds of voting, we adopted the name SAPHIR (German for sapphire).

It was up to Bernhard to speak the closing words. He praised the high motivation of the team and stressed the fact that he had a good feeling taking over the project leadership.

The project actually turned out very successful, and it absolutely lived up to its name SAPHIR. Only the team members know the actual background of the name, and this is how it is meant to be. However, the product and our collaboration developed into an undisputed jewel in the relationship between our company and the customer.

It was my pleasure to once again accompany the entire team as facilitator six months later, this time for an extensive final delivery retrospective. When we analyzed the success factors of our team work, many participants specially mentioned the kickoff workshop. Even the handout with all the slides from the kickoff workshop had been found very useful for quick reference.

For me, SAPHIR was yet another confirmation of what I had already experienced working with a lot of teams: a well-planned and professionally facilitated kickoff workshop can efficiently and effectively prepare a team for its common tasks and help elicit its total commitment.