15 to 20 minutes
Give one of the teams 5 minutes to prepare and run an imaginary weekly kick-off meeting for everyone. Other teams can take a break during that 5 minutes.
When the presentation is over, give them this scenario:
Everyone is in the room for the kick-off meeting except for one: the representative of the finance department. You wait a little, and they don’t show up. You call, and there’s no response. After the meeting, you receive this message from them:
Sorry for not attending today’s meeting. We’re busy with an important task in our department, and the CFO wants me to stop everything else and focus on it for a while.
Give them 5 minutes to work on this situation. When the time is up, ask each facilitator to present their ideas.
The first step in such a case is to open a follow-up action:
- Cause: There’s an important task in the finance department.
- Effect: The CFO has asked the finance representative in our team to stop everything else and focus on that task.
- Impact: The concerns of the finance department won’t be reflected in the project, which introduces various risks and the possibility of a rework.
- Response: For now, let’s ask the sponsor to take care of it. Then, if it doesn’t work, we’ll try to find another solution.
- Status: Open
- Custodian: Project manager
It’s important for them to identify the fact that the sponsor is probably needed to deal with an issue like this.