Financial benefits of Facilitation

Financial benefits of Professional Facilitation:

Strategy Discussions
We prize highly specialized functional experts who have a thorough understanding of what they do. This requires us to meet often, as teams, to exchange information and get a view of the bigger picture. Often individuals feel disenfranchised from decision making and do not fully accept the results. They go off to perform their own specialized functions not abiding by the team's decision, only to find that the decision resurfaces, often with more intensity.

A 1 day workshop with the board is a tough thing to arrange. So when you have the board in place you want to come to some clear decisons. All the board members will have very different points of view but to move forward you need consensus.

IT Projects:
• IT Projects typically complete the requirements phase of work in ¼ the amount of time. A typical facilitated workshop produces 8 weeks of requirements work in a 3-day workshop. Translated into cash this means:

An IT project requirements phase usually requires a couple of business analysts at £60 000pa, the involvement of Operations managers at £70 000pa, a project manager at £80 000 and the signoff from senior management at £100 000pa. Over an 8 week period or requiremnts gathering this could cost you up to circa £55 000.

A three day falilitated workshop with these people would cost circa £14 000.

• If an IT project costs £1 million and the requirements phase requires one-quarter of the effort, then requirements cost £250,000. Using facilitated workshops to gather requirements cuts the time to ¼, savings almost £180,000. That amounts to one-fifth the cost of the project – just for requirements!

• In addition, because the requirements are consensus based and more complete, development time is reduced and quality increases adding to the savings.

Using facilitated workshops brings additional benefits to an organization beyond financial benefits as the previous points illustrate. Using facilitated workshops provides intangible benefits such as engagement of their human capital. Engaging
a greater portion of an organization:

• Increases the number of ideas an organization has to work with. This enables tremendous innovation.
• Increases morale – people feel more valued when asked to participate.