How to use Board as a project management tool to initiate change within the team

How to allow local authorities to modernize their management approach by encouraging them to adopt a more agile management? This is the question Julien, Creativity Manager, asks himself. He uses Klaxoon as a project management and workshop organization tool to invite these local authorities to question their group dynamics.

Objective: modernize classic management and make it more agile

Julien Gouëllo is Creativity Manager for a consulting firm. His objective is to support local authorities in the realization of their innovation projects. Within his company, he stimulates all the teams, on the client side as well as internally, and introduces them to new agile methods that increase their efficiency tenfold.

As a great fan of agile methods, Julien is looking for a way to share certain ideas and give them greater visibility, to facilitate the training of all employees in these new methods.

This was the case when, at the beginning of the 2020 school year, he assisted a steering committee that wanted to modernize its way of doing things, in particular by moving away from a very traditional and vertical management style.

Julien sets up an agile workshop that allows the team to ask themselves the right questions and identify the team's strengths and weaknesses. To do this, he uses Klaxoon and its Board tool, which allows him to set up this agile workshop remotely!

Board as a project management and workshop organization tool

Julien's goal is to animate this workshop remotely, while improving participation: he wants all participants to be real actors of these teamwork times, to improve the effects.

We want to develop a collaborative culture among our customers and in fact it's not complicated, just open a Klaxoon Board!

So Julien launches a Board, and applies a template on it: the Speedboat. He uses the boat metaphor to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the team he coaches.

Specifically, he organizes a workshop in 3 steps.

The first step consists of a brainstorming exercise during which participants will have to identify several axes in their group dynamics:

● the strengths, represented by the wind,

● the irritants and therefore the reason for this desire to improve: these are the anchors,

● the major problems that one must try to tame and bypass: these are the counter-currents,

● the challenges, represented by the reefs.

Thanks to the visual management, which allows to represent the boat metaphor and to clarify the ideas, as well as to the advanced participation of the team members, this step is achieved in only 1 hour! Each participant shares his or her ideas following a predefined color code according to the type of information shared: the ideas come from the whole team, but without making the Board a mess!

The second step serves to push the reflection further, this time in an asynchronous way.

Julian begins by categorizing the ideas: these are dimensions he can give to the ideas on the Board to better organize them. In this way, he links the ideas together and identifies categories of ideas that have not been explored. He ensures that all possibilities have been explored by the participants to make this work session more effective than ever.

During this time, he asks participants to think of concrete actions that can be implemented quickly to initiate positive change as soon as possible. To do this, the participants value themselves as they put forward their own skills, their personal know-how and their know-how as a team.

These concrete actions will be initiated by the participants during a whole week, until the next step.

The following week, the third step of this workshop takes place: it is about reporting on the previous week's session and the actions implemented during the week: the goal here is to build a strategy and a concrete action plan, with achievable objectives.

Results: an unparalleled time saving and a more united and agile team!

For Julien, organizing this workshop using the Board project management tool is a very good idea!

In concrete terms, he greatly appreciates the fact that it is the teams themselves who come to define their own limits, problems, fears, but also their own strengths and what will help them overcome the difficulties they encounter.

Moreover, when he uses it as a project management tool, Julien saves a lot of time with Klaxoon and Board. Indeed, setting up the Board is very simple, and always fast with the possibility to install a template from the template library if needed. For projects that require the creation of a custom board, no problem: the many tools of Klaxoon Board allow to prepare a board adapted to any occasion and to meet all your specific needs.

Julien also appreciates the quality of the reporting: as all participants work on the same connected Board, reporting is very easy. One click is all it takes to export the Board and get a summary of all the information published on it. This feature makes the Board a great project management tool, allowing you to share the progress of a workshop with the hierarchy, but also with the participants themselves.

That said, participants can always keep access to the Board, which then becomes an evolving space, where everyone adds their own information as they go along.

Finally, Julien appreciates the fact that only Klaxoon can be used to organize both synchronous and asynchronous workshops. Even though this would be difficult to do in a face-to-face environment, the clear visual management, voting and polling features allow Board to effectively manage meetings that adopt a more hybrid approach.

You too, to organize your workshops, train your teams or manage projects with a connected board, rely on Board!

If you want to know more, discover Julien's webinar available here :