Professional Facilitation delivers 300% ROI

A difficult management situation to solve

A client recently approached us to facilitate a Senior Leadership Team (SLT) away day focused on resourcing strategy, in particular resolving a people capacity issue. 

In a nutshell, the team had more work than people able to do it (sound familiar?). The SLT wanted to get the whole management team together to determine how they best approach this situation to deliver the critical work, and meet customer expectations, without overloading the employees. A fine balancing act!

Extra complications were that:

• each Group within the Division needed to have a say on each other’s capacity plan due to the interrelatedness of the work

• previous events had been run over two days and had not effectively addressed the challenges. Instead, the result was too many people out of the office for too long without sufficient outcomes generated.

An inspired Treehouse solution

Using the 4D approach (Diagnose, Develop, Deliver, Do) we realised that this brief was all about the ‘dance-card’ – how to bring together the Groups to have collaborative conversations in an efficient but effective manner.

(For the mathematicians reading this you might be interested to know that due to the many Groups involved we used triangular numbers to create the dance-card).

The Treehouse team designed and facilitated a workshop for 47 people with the clear objective to identify the work that needs to be done, prioritise it, and determine the best approach for that work - whether completed internally or externally, parked or binned.

Recommendations from the workshops were shared with the SLT, who then made decisions and gave feedback to the Groups on the very same day.

Given the capacity constraints, we knew the workshop had to be efficient and deliver effective recommendations so that definitive decisions could be made at the end of the away day. The Treehouse team were able to structure the workshops and achieve delivery of results in one day that ran 0930-1630hrs.

Outcomes delivered in half the time

The recommendations and decisions made from the workshops enabled the SLT to plan workloads and operations using the available resource capacity. The client was relieved to have the visibility to resource projects and meet customer expectations without overburdening employees.

In addition, sensible, clear decisions on the next steps were made and communicated to the Groups at the workshop, resulting in work being reallocated immediately without any hesitancy.

Each Group felt involved and listened to – they had their say on work priorities and how it should be allocated.

The workshop delivered a 300% return on investment for the client as the Treehouse professional facilitators were able to design and deliver a strategy away day that took just one day, not the expected two. The entire workshop also came in at £2k under budget, which was also a nice bonus for the client.

The delighted client commented;

“I’m super happy with what you’ve achieved! We got the answers we needed in half the time we originally estimated. It has saved us more than £30,000 of taxpayers’ money!”

Treehouse has since been asked back by the client to help them with a new challenge, which is always great recognition of a job well done!