A suggested agenda of a Game Plan workshop for teams and questions to use in a Digital Facilitation.
Game Plan Workshop – a suggested high level agenda
Who
- Function and Team level workshops facilitated by their manager
Decide the best format to run the workshop with your team:
-
- Digital Facilitation
- Whiteboard tool like Mural or Miro
- Post Its / Sticky Notes
Agenda
- Share the context - any higher-level team and function Game Plans as a baseline for a team Game Plan.
- Explain the rationale for why the organisation is using Game Plans.
- Complete the core components of the Game Plan using the Game Plan Questions.
- Set outcome-based goals (OKRs) for the upcoming period.
Post workshop steps
- Share and discuss your Game Plan with a manager and highlight Methods and Obstacles.
- Put Game Plan and OKRs in TG
- Ensure Game Plans continue to reflect the current OKR status during weekly or biweekly check-ins.
Core Components - Game Plan Questions
1. Vision and Purpose
How to do it- Start from the context of your organisation's purpose and goals - use any higher-level function/unit Game Plans.
- Decide the role your team plays in ensuring organizational success.
- Use digital facilitation to get ideas from the team using the questions below.
- If you’ve already discussed these ideas/topics/questions with the team you can draft them straight into your Game Plan.
- What is our team why?
- What is the change we want to make?
- How would it look if we were successful?
- What do we as a team want to achieve?
- Whose life are we trying to impact positively?
- What does our ideal world look like?
2. Values, Drivers and Principles
How to do it- Use Digital Facilitation to derive team values, drivers and principles from your team Vision. Gather the input from the team and vote on it; use that as a starting point for the conversation.
- List team beliefs and drivers that are important to share – even the ones that are obvious or feel apparent to you.
- Specify all your values, drivers and principles – even if they conflict with others.
- You can choose to visualize your values using sliders to show the friction or emphasis between competing values.
- What is important to us?
- Ask from an outside-in point of view, how do we want to be perceived by others?
- How do we want to represent ourselves to our customers?
- What drives our decision-making and behaviour?
- What would we not tolerate as a team?
3. Objectives and Key Results
Team Objectives – what we want to achieve
- What are our goals?
- What do we want to achieve by the end of the period?
Key Results – the measure of how we achieve our objectives
- Outcome-based, measurable and specific
- How will we measure if we have been successful in achieving our goals by the end of the period?
To create Bottom Up OKRs:
- How can our team contribute to our organisation's goals?
- What specifically can we do to contribute to our unit/function (higher level) Objectives?
- What would be the best outcome-based metrics to measure our team's success?
- What other teams do we need to align with to ensure we work effectively and don’t duplicate work?
4. Questions, Obstacles & Dependencies
How to do it- Once you have identified the goals for the team that you would like to achieve, use digital facilitation to gather input into what might be the obstacles or dependencies that could keep you from achieving your goals.
- Discuss the outcomes.
- Vote to prioritize and limit the number of obstacles and dependencies to five.
- Assign the top five obstacles and dependencies to owners.
Questions to ask the team - choose the most appropriate/relevant ones
- What do we need to be able to work efficiently?
- Where are we dependent on others?
- What critical obstacles can we identify?
- Which obstacles are the most critical to resolve, and how will we resolve them?
5. What we will not focus on?
How to do it- Once you have identified the goals and any obstacles and dependencies for the team, use digital facilitation to gather thoughts on what might be ‘nice to work on’ but may be a distraction in the current period.
- What will we definitely not work on during this period?
- What might be a distraction for us right now?
- What is maybe desired, but not a priority and will not contribute to us reaching our current goals?
6. Methods & Plans
How to do it- Once you have the objectives you can use Digital facilitation to discuss what would be the key drivers and initiatives to reach them
- Rank and prioritize the list.
- Assign each owner and any necessary contributors.
- Assign each a date to be completed by.
Questions to ask the team - choose the most appropriate/relevant ones
- What specific actions do we need to take?
- What are the most critical and urgent actions?
- Where can we get help from?
- What additional resources do we need?