ActionMap Waves

What hasn’t been mentioned yet is the “next best solution” as an alternative to the long cycles of meetings and communications. That solutions is group work sessions led by skilled, trained and experienced individuals. These sessions and individuals are identified by terms such as “JAD”, “Workouts”, “Black Belts” and so on.

There are many people in “business analyst”, “project manager” and simply “manager” roles that have the ability to lead these sessions as well.

Also, a particular variation of this approach is “high performance teams”, in which a relatively small group has a well-developed and effective combination of skills, training and experience.

The key to the success of this approach is that it does address the need to create understanding and consensus at the same time as models and plans. However, this approach has three major constraints.

  - The capabilities of these individuals and teams tend to be focused in particular content or method areas, so the results are not highly transportable.

  -  These resources are not highly flexible, in the sense that they generally require significant preparation and structured environments.

  - This approach has not yet proven to be scalable, in the sense that these skills can be transferred to enough people to make a significant impact on the bottleneck.

The net of this is that with respect to the “skilled individual or team” approach, the total market demand for collaborative solutions development is still barely being dented.

Next: Why a New Category?