sounds more like innovation management.

Thank you Brian,

yes most of the projects i am involved are development of new solutions for existing problems. So it is innovation management and you need intrinsic motivated people who are creative and develop their own ideas.

Thank you Gunnar,

E. Schein is new to me ! But i have seen, there is some connection to Otto Scharmer who developed Theory "U" So thanks a lot.

In my experience team dynamics have determined outcomes regardless of whose or what methodology is employed. We have a plethora of terminology to describe the same thing.....'connecting the dots in new ways' etc., but in a competitive world the development of a new insight is highly dependent on how a specific group interacts and 'thinks' about the problem to be solved. Getting the interplay between the team members optimized has been the key to not only the discovery of solutions but the actualization of the ideas generated.

There are many approaches coming out of the innovation/entrepreneurship fields that would fit and encourage more customer/market engagement during early tech dev phases. With my last startup the tools of design thinking, sprints were helpful to frame a process and facilitate activities. From there I used Asana and Slack to create a flexible environment to guide development work.

Michael,

thank you for pointing that out. "Getting the interplay between the team members optimized " is a good slogan.

Hezekiah,

Thank you for your answer. In Germany "Design Thinking" is a big buzzword at the moment. And as we tend to stay to long in the lab, it is needed here.

Asana is new to me, will try it out.

Yes, I have experience. Being a development specialist and 'non-technical' person in the domain of 'technical' people in my professional life had to play that role. If your objective is right, you need to make sure that the intended ultimate beneficiaries are reached with interventions, you being a facilitator can help articulate the pathways as a neutral person. If you have the ability to judge the context and you have access to various tools that are useful and you know how to use them in particular contexts, you can make a difference. You can become friends to all stakeholders after having very difficult period of establishing you into that context. You have to be able to achieve that trust pretty quick within your team as an useful facilitator.

Hi Ahmad,

thank you for that answer. This sounds promising. I also like that approach.

It gives the best combination between the team's self responsibility and good project management and achieving the goals.

Rudi, managing approach tends to ensure that resources such as skills of people, time and budget are analysed and evaluated properly to achieve objectives for the projects. Whereas facilitating approach aim to give resources such as people the chance to do task deliverables by allowing people, groups to interact with one another (steering their processes within the structure/group/work-break-down structures) to achieve their project scope/s. Facilitation is the process of observing, guiding and ensuring that the group of people are on-track to achieve objective/s and if the facilitator through his or her experiences senses that the group or people are not on-track to achieve success than the Facilitator guides them (helps them to steer the process efficiently and effectively). I tend to use more of a facilitation approaches for project management.

Vanaja, thank you for your response. I managed technical projects for many years in small and medium sized industry companies. My experience is that often (especially under stress) one tend to underestimate teams ability to solve project problems alone. Especially when the manager himself is also a former specialist who made some career now. For these guys (like me...) it is very helpful to have (beside original Project management skills) good knowledge about the facilitator approach and the mindset.

Management is independent of the site, invariant science and its knowledge makes it easierDear Rudi,

I managed two projects for a major Public Broadcaster. At the time I was hired, the organisation's brilliant and dedicated Technical team were being critised by the Commercial/ Operations team for missing hard milestones, which were unreleastic, given the world leading edge nature of the in-house development. I became the communications bridge between the Technical and Commecial arms of the organisation by converting Technical jargon to plain language and converting complex project milestones to simple phased deliverables, thus facilitating a comfortable environment for all parties. Discussions with User Groups were facilitated, to obtain maximum refinement of product features early in the development phase. The Technical Team understood that my role as Project Manager was to facilitate their focus on Technical Issues by my shouldering as much of the bureaucratic burden as possible. In Technical debugging brainstorming I ensured that the junior Engineer/Designers were valued members of the team.

The outcome was successful in that the Project won the Australian Design award and National Engineering awards for Innovation and Excellence and for its contribution to Technology History.

I used scenario planning as a tool to create a shared vision in a software research team. This was judged a success.

A project manager has the typical responsibility to execute a project, and of course, manage the whole project cycle, depending the project context, organization and the complexity of the project. By virtue a facilitator does not carry any responsibility per se, and may contribute as an inside critique. For example, I served in an R&D project to develop 'Decision Support Systems' for Logistics, Pubic Distribution and Urban Transportation. Being an international funded project, we have some external experts who used to visit us and learn what's going on and provide their feedback, but do not carry any responsibility towards the success or failure of a project.

Hello everybody,

thank you so much for sharing your experience.

Dear Contributors,

thanks again for your answers. It seems to me that the focus of leaders and also project managers goes more and more from individuals to institutional aspects like group level emotional intelligence. This makes sense to me since we are going to leave the situation of managing people towards managing connections between people. This can be done with the facilitator approach of enabling groups to work effective and good together. To whom it may concern here is an interesting podcast i found this week:

http://fulcrumconnection.com/blog/024-increase-emotional-intelligence-team

Regards, Rudi

According to my decades experience the best way of helping a project manager and his/her team is by mentoring and active listening. To do this you must have your own experience and an extremely broad spectrum of personal experience as well as multiple connections in a variety of disciplines. It is most efficient to listen to the expressed needs of the project team members as well as to realize their implied needs and to ask for clarifications when needed. Then you should connect the team and the project manager with competent people who can help beyond the limits of the skills and know-how existing within the project team. Mentor's formal authority is of little or no importance while legitimacy is crucial in such situations.

Hi Dan

thank you for this answer. i like the role you describe. I look for the best way to help project teams without being "important" myself. My satisfaction is to see later success of them and having no direct evidence of my influence if you understand what i mean. Regards Rudi

... One more comment, Rudi. A facilitator acts on two orthogonal dimensions question (Q) and solution (S). In "steady state" the facilitator keeps staying in the Q, asking questions and by doing so facilitating the audience to reflect, solve issues and provide answers with no external intervention. In the case the audience asks the facilitator for his/her opinion on a specific issue then the facilitator may switch momentary to S and then returning to Q. Staying in Q is exactly what you call "being neutral".