What is Facilitation and How is it Used?

Faciliitation is a process that requires quite a bit of pre-planning and preparation to properly implement.  Done properly it is a way of getting others to communicate effectively and completely with one another in a controlled environment.  A facilitator is not actually involved in the meeting or planning session, rather they are there to guide the meeting and to draw out the information needed to support the goal.

At MicroDeveloper, we use faciliation to draw out requirements and to garner ownership and responsibility for the decisions needed for building or implementing the projects we are involved in.  We will never call a meeting and just go to it.  We follow very methodical plans and methods for implementing and conducting the sessions with the ultimate framework being of joint application development (JAD) as our guiding principal. The simple reality is that this is your application or issue we are trying to build or resolve not ours.  In the end, you should be 100% happy with the solution and final product.  Anyone who has been involved in long-term development project knows that can be elusive. The JAD methodology helps to solve that problem.

You can't just read a book and 'do JAD'.  It takes an extensive amount of training and practice to properly implement and facilitate the collection information necessary to properly implement JAD.  Our background has allowed us to be extensively trained and practiced in JAD and JAD facilitation to allow us to expertly conduct JAD sessions. For ever 10 years we have been using JAD methods on our projects, both large and small, with very high degrees of success.  In fact, we somewhat insist on JAD or at least some other well known process prior to performing developement.

Some Facilitation Use Examples

Facilitation, properly employed, can be used for just about any kind of meeting where a concensus is the desired outcome.  These are just a few of the ways we use our faciliation capabilities to help your organizaiton.