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The serious game is from the great Visual Teams book by David Sibbet and called Hopes and Fears

Hopes and Fears

It can be difficult to get people to open up to a group and express fears about the pending introduction of SharePoint.  You may be really concerned about this new wizzy collaboration platform being rolled out when you only just got the hang of the shared folders.  In the hopes and fears game you do the following.

1) Use a large board or better still a roll of A0 paper stuck to the wall.  On the paper write in big letters Hopes & Fears leaving most of the page blank.

2) Get the team to break up into groups of 2.  In a fixed time (20 minutes works well)  get each pair to interview each other and record their Hopes and Fears.

3) Bringing the team back together get each person to present their pairs hopes and fears adding them to the wall (If you have a good graphic facilitator they can write them out, if not use post it notes and stick them to the wall.

The benefit of this approach is that it is not the person who is presenting their fears but someone else which has the effect of removing the personal element and making more of a team hope or fear.

As you add the hopes and fears to the wall try to group them, you will find that you end up with some common themes, which show the areas you should look to address but also some of the hopes the team has that can feed into any vision games.

This game does not aim to address the fears, but it does make them visible and helps the team to open up and start to trust each other more, it will also help the people doing the roll out to understand the areas they need to focus on to ensure a successful adoption.

Hopes and Fears in Action

I recently ran a very quick overview presentation (find it on SlideShare) of Innovation Games to the East Anglia SharePoint User Group.

The aim of the 1 hour session was to give a little insight into where SharePoint project challenges are and how, through the use of Serious Games techniques, such as Innovation Games(R) and Gamestorming we can break the vicious cycle of poor requirements gathering, unhappy users,  SharePoint Celery and conflict between IT and the business teams.

I planned to cut the slides to a minimum and focus as much time as possible on actually playing a couple of games (“Start Your Day” and “Product Box”). When it came to planning and prepping the resources for the session earlier that day, I found I didn’t have one of the right graphical templates for “Start Your Day”, so I made my own:

Start Your SharePoint Day (Days of the week) - Graphical Template

Start Your Day

The purpose of the template is to enable me to facilitate a group of ‘stakeholders’ or users (in this case User Group attendees) to plot with post-it’s, drawings etc when they use a product (in this case SharePoint) and for what Purpose.

During facilitation of the session and afterwards collating the information, you get an awesome insight into why (VERY important), how and when people use SharePoint (in this case); you gain insights into the highs and lows of usage and learn about peoples dependency on the subject matter.

During our discussions about the “Start Your SharePoint Day” session, I was chatting with the group about how these techniques could be used to unearth opportunities for developing new functionality and generating business value ideas that could be applied to the current platform; “Start Your Day” played as described above, will certainly unearth some of these through attendees discussing missing functionality or problems they encounter, but the focus of the ‘question’ and the way it’s facilitated ‘normally’ doesn’t focus on this, that’s not it’s original goal.

So what if we turned the game on it’s head?
What if we  purposefully sought to gain insights into new project areas for the current platform, how could that work within an organisation?

Maximising SharePoint Value in Your Org

The reality is that it’s pretty straightforward:

• Stick up a graphical template on a wall, like the one above
  (21apps will happily work with you to create some suitable for your organisation)
• Ask your customers/stakeholders to completely ignore SharePoint
• Get people to write on post-its all the (non-SharePoint) systems, processes and manual activities that they use or do or rely on through the week
  (extend out to months, quarters, seasons, years if its appropriate)
• Let them cluster similar things together to show level of use/need

There, you now have a rich pool of customer-driven opportunities for future SharePoint enhancements!

You could also go one-step further, once you’ve discussed these opportunities and ask people to use “Dot Voting” or “Prune the Product Tree” to choose the top opportunities they want you to deliver for the business.

Let’s do it…

If this sounds like an awesome way of unlocking some of the business value opportunities that are lying dormant within your organisation, then let us know at 21apps, we’d love to come and facilitate a session with your stakeholders and help maximise your organisations use of SharePoint.

Take some solace in the fact that you are not alone…

Take some advice from 21apps and let us help you clear the mists of despair through facilitation, serious games and visualisations!

Gus Fraser (@gusfraser) recently made the move to Jersey and being active in the SharePoint community has worked hard to get the 1st event off the ground.  Myself and Ant are delighted to be able to support this event and would love to see you there – perhaps we could get some French SharePoint’ers to make the hop over.

It also just so happens that the session finishes just after the last plane leaves! That means we will be have to stay and support the biggest SharePoint social event – SharePint   – It’s a hard life but someone has to do it…..

Check out the agenda, if you can justify a night out in the channel islands then sign up and join us or follow the events via twitter tag #CISPUG and #SharePint

In the press release I stated:

“We see the nGage toolset bringing value to many of our SharePoint projects especially nGage Intelligence – the behavioural analytics piece. We believe in metrics and measurable business outcomes.  Using nGage Intelligence to crystallise the current state and then track forward progress -is very compelling for us and our clients.”

Download the PDF Press release.

This was inspired by the times when I’ve been with business users working through their requirements. Its seems inevitable that a requirement crops up that is part of Enterprise Edition – which IT decided wasn’t affordable.

The principle describes the effect of people who join an organisation (as a cucumber in the analogy) full of enthusiasm, only to find over time they become just another pickle in the same jar.

I’m sure you have all heard the phrase “that’s how it’s always been done!” – the people saying that are sadly pickled.  How then, when we introduce a new technology like SharePoint, do we expect to change the way people work?  When you have a Jar full of pickles!

As consultants in this regards we have an advantage,  we join your company and look to effect change, we can see where things are difficult and where there can be improvement. If changing the culture of an organisation was easy and just installing SharePoint meant the company would overnight become more social, more connected and collaborative, we wouldn’t have a lot to do.

How do you avoid becoming pickled, how can you fight the brine?

1 – 21Shift Model

Like you we need help fighting the brine, for this we developed the 21Shift model to keep things focused when they seem to be getting squishy.

2 – Serious Games

Bring fun and excitement into the company, use serious games to help people innovate and see what is really important.

3 – Don’t get distracted by the technology

Yes you need the technology to work, but let the geeks deal with it you have more important things to consider.  Stay out of the technology and focus on changing the way people work all day every day.

4 – Act like a newbie – be the cucumber

Don’t be afraid to ask “Why?”  Act like a beginner, ask the stupid and obvious questions, wonder at the possibilities.

5 – Be part to the community

Become a part of the SharePoint community (in the UK – SUGUK ), see what others are doing, open yourself up to learning from others.  Make it part of your job to attend conferences and user groups. Get out of the Jar regulary to see whats really happening.

Start today and avoid becoming pickled.

This post was inspired by the gapingvoid Jar and the pickled principle post by Eric Laramée