Microsoft CSM Facilitation Strategies Course

The facilitation course is itself an exercise in facilitation and as such, by making the process transparent, it provides a basis for seeing some of the workings behind a facilitated experience. The resources included under background will help you to understand the thinking that has been undertaken in preparation for this.

(Please don’t feel he need to delve into these links in detail – but seek to understand the process that has been followed, and use it to build your own confidence that the event has been constructed to meet your needs)

• Results of pre-interviews – what should we deliver through the course?
• Aspiration – what are we ideally working toward through this
• Within our aspiration – what are our goals for this particular course?
• What strategies will we learn about in support of those goals?
• How do we structure these things into an event with continuity and flow?
• And how do we pull this back into a structured plan for the event?

For interest, all of the above (including meetings to review this with senior client staff) has consumed 3.5 days (c. 35 hours) in preparation for the event – time (and your own reactions) will tell if it was a worthwhile investment.

There is a small amount of work for each person to do in preparation for their attendance at the course (about 30-45 minutes). There are four pieces of preparation that are required for you (and your colleagues) to get the best out of the course.

1. The first item is to set yourself up on the feedback tool we will use. This is key to developing a shared repository of insight and ideas based on the course and people’s reactions to the things within it.
2. The second item may sound trivial but you will find (in the training) it has surprising potential to understand the factors in success. Please download this single page of instructions for making a paper plane, and use them to make one or two prior to the training.
3. The third item is to research two of the meeting tools that are available to support events such as the SPW and other activities to support customer progress.
4. The fourth item is to download the OneNote tool which will enable you to track your development and to access a number of key documents during the training

You can also download a handout of the slides for the course as a pdf. This will enable you to annotate your notes without having to replicate the screen content. We only ask that you do not read ahead, since this will undermine the power of some of the learning.

The final section below links to resources we will be using during the course. Please do not look at the content of this section until requested to do so within the course by the course facilitator. Please do not access the links on this page until asked to do so by the course facilitator.

Target setting for clothesline

Results of memory list