Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
The mental model CATER will help you recall the five ways to improve any form of team facilitation. CATER does two big things necessary for all great facilitated sessions. The mental model creates comparable knowledge among participants and opens feedback channels for successful collaboration. Apply systems thinking and improve team performance by CATERing to your participants. [Read more…]
Majority voting and consensus decision making are two distinct approaches to making decisions in group environments, each with its own characteristics and implications. Consensus decision-making is an alternative to debate and passage of proposals that can be approved through a majority vote. It does not emphasize the goal of the full agreement but instead focuses on acceptance or “living with it.” Choosing the right method for the context, and more importantly, managing the dissenting view, is important in making good group decisions.
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Fist to five voting is a simple and effective way to gather group feedback or to gauge consensus in a meeting or discussion. In this method, participants are asked to rate their level of support for an idea or proposal on a scale of 1 to 5, using their fingers. However, fist to five is a decision-making technique that should be described in the project charter and agreed upon by all participants. Ample time should be allowed between the initial poll and the final vote for negotiation and agreement to occur. [Read more…]
Facilitating with FINESSE: How to Guide People to Powerful Business Solutions is a practitioner’s guide for ten common applications that technically trained professionals are frequently asked to facilitate. The range of applications covers quality and reliability techniques such as block diagrams and tree diagrams through master plans and strategic plans. This article provides five impactful elements for professionals who are often enlisted to lead teams to workable solutions, despite having little or no facilitation training,
The book focuses on ten practical applications and provides specific ways to facilitate them better. There is not a lot of wasted time on the basics covered by most facilitation books. Each self-contained application includes examples – good and bad – from my experiences on some complicated and controversial projects.
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Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. Facilitation plays a pivotal role.
Facilitators should understand the strengths and weaknesses of the qualitative assessments we facilitate and design. Qualitative assessments measure the opinions, attitudes, knowledge, perceived behaviors, observations, beliefs, and experiences of individuals who use a system the most. The correct understanding is fundamental as we lead participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all. [Read more…]
Technical professionals are often asked to “lead” teams through the application of assessment tools such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), Root Cause Analysis (RCM), and Reliability Block Diagrams. In some cases, you may be a department manager. In other cases, you are the subject matter expert. Sometimes senior management simply knows you are willing to do it.
The issue is not whether you are smart enough or the most personable engineer in the group. The problem is that you may have all the hard skills required to do the assessment, but you lack formal training in the soft skills. Most of us do the best we can.
This article provides some insights for doing better rather than just being adequate.
“Team leadership is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results.” – Ifeanyi Onuoha
One of the key factors for successful application of FMEAs is skillful facilitation of FMEA teams. The skills needed for excellent facilitation are different from the skills needed to be a good FMEA team member. [Read more…]
We facilitate. As reliability professionals, we often lead teams to identify risk. We help cross-functional teams find and implement solutions. We bring people together and ease their ability to communicate clearly with each other.
Whether a leader or participant we have a role to achieve the desired goals. Our ability to facilitate enables us to work with others to get things done. Understanding how to facilitate well permits us to add value when leading or participating on a team. [Read more…]