ISACA COBIT 5 – Team Management (BOK III) Part 4

11. Meeting Management (BOK III.C.2)

As a Six Sigma leader, team leader, you would need to conduct a number of meetings. And this topic is related to managing meetings. How do you manage meetings? These might be some common sense points only. There’s nothing new about that. That when you have a meeting, you need to have agenda. So if you have agenda, then your meeting will be on track. So you can consider this as a tool, a tool to conduct meeting. A tool to make sure that your meetings are on time, meetings are on track. And another thing in the meeting management is make sure that you have time management because you have a fixed time for the meeting. So if your meeting is for 30 minutes, you have to end that meeting in 30 minutes.

And you need to cover all the agenda points in the meeting during those 30 minutes only. And many times this might require some pre work from participants, because meeting is a place where you meet all together. But if there is anything which is one to one interaction, people could have done that prior to the meeting. So when you are giving agenda, probably you might want to give them the pre work that before meeting these all things need to be done and clarified so that you can just quickly look at the results of that rather than going into details. So that’s how you manage your meeting time. And you need to make sure that right people are in the meeting.

Having too many people, many time will lead to digression in the meeting topic, because each person would have a different point of view, different interest. Make sure you just have the right amount of people in the meeting and you have right resources. And when I mean right resources that could include a projector, or if you are having this outside company somewhere, make sure that you have a writing pad, pen and all those resources which could be needed for the meeting. So there’s nothing new about that. But this is one topic which as a team leader, you need to be aware that you need to manage team manage team meetings.

12. Team Tools (BOK III.C.3)

Hey, welcome back. In this section we will be talking about team tools, what all tools you need to manage your team. So here in this section we are talking of four tools here, Brandon brainstorming, consensus, nominal group technique or NGT and multivoting. Let us look at each of these tools in next few slides, starting with brainstorming. So when you say brainstorming, you do brainstorming to get a number of ideas for a specific issue. So you have a problem, you have a thing on which you want ideas from people. And here your thought is on getting more and more ideas. Many times those ideas might look irrelevant at the first look, but don’t bother about that. Just note down, because in brainstorming you are not expected to judge any idea because if you start judging ideas, then that will put a stop to further ideal something might look relevant, might not look relevant. But just keep on noting that because at this time you want to get the maximum number of ideas which you can get, and the evaluation could of course be done later on. Brainstorming could be done as a group, which normally is done, but you can do individually also.

So if I want to do brainstorming on what all I need to add in this six Sigma training course, I can do individual brainstorming and start thinking, okay, I need to do this, I need to do that. But then you keep on noting down without judging that, even if you are doing that individually. So judgment is defered and the goal is to reach quantity, not the quality of ideas at this time. So just to summarize, in brainstorming there are four rules that focus is on quantity and not on quality, withhold any criticism of any idea. Don’t evaluate, don’t judge, don’t criticize and welcome unusual ideas as well. Those might look to you unusual in the first look, but probably there might be a real good thing in those ideas. So just keep on recording, just keep on noting down that even if it looks unusual, and combine and improve ideas, because one idea generates to another idea leads to another idea. So with that you can have more and more ideas on a particular issue or a particular problem. So that completes our discussion on brainstorming.

To collect ideas, another theme tool is consensus building. You need to build a consensus because if you have a team, if you have number of people, each will have a different idea about something. But as a team you need to reach at one conclusion or at a one final thought. That’s where consensus building comes into picture. So when you have to build consensus, when you have a differing opinion and you want to agree on a one answer to that, the things to do there would be listening to each of them, listening to the opinion of people, discussing that, and then bargaining that what would we lose if we do this instead of that? And then fixing on to one particular solution, which you want to deliver as a final team output, not as an individual output. So four individual might have four different opinions.

But as a team, when you propose something that will be a team decision which everyone is bound to. So in the starting you might have a different opinion. But once you give a solution, once you finally deliver a solution as a team, then everyone needs to be bound to that, committed to that. And this is agreement which probably everyone can live with based on the discussions which you have, based on the bargaining which you had during this consensus building process. So here we have another team tool which is nominal group technique. This is similar to brainstorming. In brainstorming we had a group which sat together and talked about an issue and number of ideas were generated.

But in nominal group technique we have five steps. The step number one is introduction and explanation. So team sits together, the problem is introduced, is discussed and explained. Then each person silently generates ideas. No doubt those ideas unlike brainstorming, in brainstorming people were free to submit their ideas. But here each one is supposed to write, each one is supposed to generate individual ideas silently. The advantage of that is in brainstorming you might have some people who are passive and some are sort of over aggressive.

So over aggressive people will have more ideas, they will be dominating and then there will be few people who might not be able to put their ideas through. But in nominal group technique each one is supposed to write down their own ideas and then later on these ideas are shared with the team and then there’s a group discussion on that and then you can have a voting and ranking. So this is more or less similar to brainstorming but with a little bit of twist here that the starting process is individual. In the starting you generate ideas individually. So in brainstorming and nominal group technique you would have generated a number of ideas, number of thoughts. But then you need to limit those ideas to actionable level. You cannot work on 20 solutions at a time. So you need to work on certain selective ideas only. So that’s where this technique of multivoting comes into picture. So in brainstorming you generated a long list of ideas. Then multivoting technique is used to reduce or narrow down the list, narrow down the list based on group consensus. So as a group you see all the ideas and you then you decide that which all you want to work on.

Now so what you do in this is that each individual, each member so once you have listed down all these ideas, then each member or each individual selects maybe three, maybe five ideas out of that big list, a big list of let’s assume that that big list was 20 ideas. So each individual member will select three or five, whatever you agree, and then each member will give them a rank from one to three or one to five depending on how many ideas you allowed each member to select. And based on that you create a multi voting matrix and you do calculation that which one should be used going forward. So let’s see a matrix which is a sample matrix on the next slide, how you compile those votings to make a decision that which all ideas we will be going forward with.

So here we have a sort of a matrix, on the top we have a member. So in this, let’s say there were five members, a B Cde, and then there were ten ideas generated, 1234-5678, 910 on a vertical axis. Then each member was supposed to pick three ideas and give them a rating of one, two and three, where three is the more important one. If you give more value to one idea then give it number three and the less number two and number one.

So just pick three ideas out of ten. So each member selected that for example, member A selected idea number two as the most important and gave it a rating of three, then idea number five and gave it a rating of number two. And then the idea number six was given a rating of one and each member did that. And once you add all these numbers you will end up as idea number two and idea number five which got the most votes. So that way with this matrix you end up selecting idea number two and five for going forward. So even though in the brainstorming in the nominal group technique there are a number of ideas, but then later on when you evaluated that, you found out that instead of ten you just want to go ahead with these two. So that’s how multivoting is used.

• Category: Uncategorized