SAFRI: managing change and research methods

The third day of SAFRI 2010 has come and gone and I’m exhausted. The sessions are intense and for the first time in years, I found myself counting the minute ’til the coffee break. But even that doesn’t offer any respite because it’s regarded as an opportunity for informal discussion about your project.

We switched back to a presentation / workgroup format today, with the focus being on managing change in the morning, and on research methods in the afternoon. I found the session on change management really interesting. The presentation was interesting but didn’t have much that you couldn’t find easily online. The really interesting bit were the activities we had to work through:

• Stakeholder analysis – identify the stakeholders in your project, taking into account their level of enthusiasm and influence. Plot the stakeholders on a matrix, creating links between them to highlight how you could create opportunities to have influential and enthusiastic stakeholders encourage those who are resistant to your project
• “Elevator speech” – prepare a 2 minute speech that you will give to a stakeholder in your project, highlighting key objectives, significance of the project and requirements. Make sure to get their attention and on your side
• Force analysis – identify forces (factors) that will work for and against the change you propose. And although we didn’t address it today, there’s space for the action one plans to take to either address the forces against, or to take advantage of the forces for your project
• SOCKS analysis – Strengths, Opportunities, Challenges, Knowledge, Stakeholders. Identify different components within each of these factors, as they relate to your project

What I liked about this session was that we were guided through the various components by using our own projects as the framework. This not only allowed us to make progress on our respective projects, but made the content much clearer than if it had only been presented to us.

As far as this afternoon’s research methods session went, we covered focus groups and survey questionnaires, but in a slightly different format. Eight volunteer, participated in a “real” focus group where the discussion was recorded and documented, then transcribed and printed out. Each group was then guided through an analysis of the transcript to identify key themes. Those themes then formed the basis of the questionnaire. This is the first time I’ve seen a qualitative method leading to a more refined quantitative method, and I think it’d be really useful for my own project.

Tomorrow we’ll be using the survey we created today, to generate data that we can analyse. While I really saw the value in today’s session, I’d have loved to have been able to use my own project for the afternoon session, much like we did in the morning session.