Reference no: EM133071303

Overview and Rationale

This assignment is intended to increase the understanding of the difficulties that can be encountered during facilitation.

Learning Objectives

This assignment is directly linked to the following learning outcomes from the course syllabus:

1. Facilitate the creation of business requirements and solution design.

Assignment Components

Write a paper analyzing a meeting gone wrong (provided below) and addressing at least 4 specific difficulties and how you would have done things differently.

Describe the problems that the meeting encountered.

Identify at least 4 specific ones and indicate what you might do about them.

Provide a good conclusion and your recommendations.

The Meeting Last Tuesday

Our weekly status meeting was held last Tuesday and as always, it was a mess, starting right on time 10 minutes late! The entire team attended (35 people), even though only the team leads ever get a chance to talk. The PM (Rick) ran the meeting as usual and started by immediately asking the first team lead for status, and then slowly worked his way down the table, lead-by-lead. The 2-page agenda listed all the team leads, along with most of the work that each team had taken on. We did not get to the last two team leads because we ran out of time, even though the meeting was set for two hours. It was hard to hear Rick as he slowly worked his way through the agenda, because the conference room is right next to the elevator.About half-way through, Bob started complaining that Ted's team was holding his group's work up - they got quite argumentative. Rick just stared at them for about 5 minutes, then firmly took control by whining, "Guys, quit yelling, OK?" Eventually they stopped fighting but did not look at each other for the rest of the meeting. My team lead is Bob, so I am not sure what this means for my work.Joanne, who works on Gary's team, is bright and she came up with two really good ideas during the meeting. In each case, Gary tried to get the group talking about them. Both times Rick told him that those topics were not on the agenda and that they had to move on to "cover everything". Gary waited for Rick to make some notes, but he didn't, so eventually Gary looked a little frustrated and wrote Joanne's ideas down himself. I hope something is done with them.It is now Friday, and I am curious about Joanne's ideas. I walked over to ask her about them, but she didn't know anything either. She said she will check with Gary and maybe the two of them can take some action.