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Creative Problem Solving Workshop

© 1994-2001, Johanna Rothman
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
781-641-4046
email: jr@jrothman.com

Workshop Objective: Everyone solves problems in their own typical ways. This workshop will help you define your default problem-solving skills, and help you understand thinking and solving problems "outside the box", and consider possible problem solving alternatives

Workshop Overview: Many projects are under pressure. Either the pressure or the reaction to the pressure results in project problems. Typical areas for problems are in project planning, project tracking, and managing the people on projects. Many of those problems show themselves during the project management activities (planning, meeting, and communicating about the project). There are a number of techniques to use to understand how to plan and track projects. This workshop provides training and experiential exercises to practice techniques to identify and solve some typical project, meeting and communications problems.

Target Audience: Technical leaders and Managers.

Prerequisites: Introduction to Problem Solving. Attendees should also have at least one year in a technical leadership role, or have at least six months managing people.

Workshop Duration: 2 days

Workshop Outline:

1. Introduction
   1. Review Seven tools
   2. Introduction to Systems dynamics, Theory of constraints, mind maps
2. Typical project problems
   1. Project planning mechanics
   2. Risk Management
   3. Schedule Estimation
   4. Project tracking mechanics
   5. Project planning example and debrief
3. Typical meeting problems
   1. Useful project meetings
   2. What to do when things go wrong.
   3. Project meeting simulation and debrief
4. Typical Communications Problems
   1. Patterns of communications
   2. Communicating "Up" and "Down"
   3. Exercise and debrief
   4. Consensus vs. other decision making models
   5. Decision making exercise and debrief
5. Summary and wrap-up.
   1. What to do tomorrow
   2. Where to go to learn more
   3. Monitoring your own learning (you as a project)

Contact me for the extended description.

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Johanna Rothman consults on managing high technology product development. She helps managers, teams, and organizations become more effective by focusing on project management, risk management and people management. Johanna uses pragmatic techniques to help her clients apply effective practices that create successful teams and projects.

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