Workshop Overview
Getting business requirements for SharePoint is hard!:
- Are you having trouble getting your business users to articulate their problems and requirements?
- Do your find your business users dont know what they want?
- Are you finding it too hard to prioritise requirements, everything is a “Must Have”?
- Does it feel too difficult aligning requirements to your business strategy?
- Is mapping your business requirements to SharePoint features really hard?
- Are you defining your requirements based on the SharePoint feature list?
The course aims to teach people how to run the games by playing the games first hand and given them insights into why they work and how to tweak them. After the day is complete you will have the confidence in taking these back into your projects and companies.
What people are saying
“Fun sized business techniques delivered with panache and ice cream” – Mike Bunyan, Defra
“A refreshing + alternative approach to the age-old problem of effective requirements gathering” – Richard Banks, Pearson
“Creative and visual ways to elicit and prioritise requirements” – Judy, Metataxis
“Valuable methods for collecting requirements from people who don’t have the language to describe them” – Ashley, The full circle
Low Tech Social Networking
Introductions start with a low tech social network, this is a great way to get the group to connect but also acts as a wonderful approach to selling the ideas of MySites and the benefits of social networks in the enterprise
Why SharePoint Projects fail
A look at the common challenges in SharePoint projects, the celery effect and some insights into why these happen… we talk a bit about complexity here – don’t worry it’s good background.
Serious Games – What are they
A key message in everything we do is ensuring everyone is on the same page, it’s therefore key that we help people understand what serious games are and how they differ from gamification. We introduce the key concepts and some of key books that people should be referring to when exploring this area.
The Games
Cover Story
We then move into playing the games starting with Cover Story – a great way to get people to think about the vision and goals for the project. If your starting out with a new project then this is a great place to start, if you coming in half way through when the project is drifting this can help you get people aligned and back on track.
Speed Boat – or as we tend to do Sail Boat
Finding out what’s working and what’s not is needed in nearly every engagement we have been involved in. Learning a simple but very effective technique like Speed boat or the modified sail boat gives you are great way of uncovering the information you need in an engaging and inclusive way.
There are lots of subtleties to the way you play the game and we help you understand these and the way to adjust the game on the fly to make it work for you.
Give them a hot tub
No project would be complete without giving the users the opportunity to explore some of the more wacky ideas. Giving them a hot tub and exploring the ideas is a great way to innovate and discover what you don’t know you don’t know.
We teach you how the game works, how to run it and how to evaluate the output. Looking specifically at how you take an interesting idea and turn it into something that you can actually deliver.
Start your day
Another Innovation Game that really helps users think about what they do and when. We use this game a lot when trying to understand how people work with information and documents as a way to support any information architecture activities.
We also show you how to apply some different rules to the game to uncover opportunities that SharePoint could be used for, further supporting the business case for the users.
Product Box
Taking people back to playschool, this is a game that takes some courage to run but really does work well. It compliments Cover Story as it helps take the ideas from the cover story and build out some of the detail. Using the cereal box principle get people to design their ideal solution.
And get them to present it back to the group 
Rainbow of Requirements
We developed this new ‘21apps’ game to help teams clarify the requirements and user stories they create. We needed a way to help teams ensure the requirements they define add value, have some way of measuring this and importantly aligning them to the vision with a clear Why?
We explain the different approaches to playing the game and how peoples experience and biases influence this.
Rivers of Information
Another 21apps developed game, this one very much in the SharePoint space. It provides a canvas to help teams explore the documents and information created in their company, the purpose, use, actions, actors, metadata and policies that apply (or should apply). Although we use the word game for this it’s actually more of a canvas on which to explore your information, providing a depth of detail that is often missed or difficult to obtain.
It’s amazing how much information you can generate, share and understand using this game.
Buy a Feature
One of my favourite games, making the whole decision making process about what to include and what to leave out collaborative and informed. The rich information gained from the negotiations and the engagement of everyone in all decisions, not just those that are there pet features, is amazing.
We teach you how to play it, some of the techniques to use and how to use the output from the game.
Look what we designed
Hopefully this has given you some insight into the way we work at 21apps, how we like to bring something new to the party. But also how we are keen to make sure that any of the techniques we promote can be put into practice.
Our next event is currently being planned. If you are interested in attending please email us info@21apps.com