martes, 17 de noviembre de 2009

my product

Product: developing workplace processes and code to address various forms of conflict
Training - 3 hours (two evening of 1.5 hours, or 3 sessions during the lunch break)
Goal: institutionalizing workplace code to address the issues
What issues: sexism, racism, homosexuality, x,y,x.. addressing conflict in the workplace
Who: NGO’s (build the contact base, and most likely to want to improve in these areas)
Numbers: small groups.
Price: I see this as a product that we can begin as pro-bono conducted by students. Later on this could be a situation where new students could be the second facilitator and gain experience and be involved in the consulting group project. Eventually, I think this product could then charge on a pre-determined price. 3 hours = how much?
What is needed: create a framework of practice that will be used in all of these trainings. This will be the ICAR brand.Here is my idea about the framework that would need some professional input, using the example of a gender workshop:
Goal: awareness of gender stereotypes, establish processes and code that address sexism, and practices to confront and handle it in the workplace. Creation of a more productive and positive work environment
session 1: 1.5 hours
20 minutes: large group, general discussion of what sexism is, provide definitions,
- 10 min: small group discussion of stereotypes for males and females
- 10 min: share in large group what each small group discussed – collaboration of ideas
20 minutes: What kinds of issues / concerns does this create in the workplace? (eg promotions, childcare..)
- 10 Small group activity
- 10 Large group presentations
15 minutes: vision – what would the ideal workplace look like
Session 2: What are the workplace procedures that most appropriately prevent and address gender issues in the workplace

My idea behind this is the language learning model: that there is a general framework that has been developed – what needs to be learned first, etc. but for each topic, the teacher / consultant can modify the small group activity, or how people interact to best demonstrate the theory. The working groups could help come up with what theories should be presented in what order, and what could be covered in a few hours. I believe the part with the least amount of creativity involved would be the workplace code that would be most effective. This should be pre-developed. We could also offer advanced training to go more in depth in handling these issues.
Thoughts anyone?

martes, 10 de noviembre de 2009

consulting group

How do a group of people with little business experience start one up? The beginning of the unfinished process began a few months ago.
Goals of the group: first, brainstorm. What are our ideas, what would a consulting group require? the goal is to have deliverables every two weeks so that we can move this process along. One of the people had experience with business plans, so for the next week, we used a template to get us going.
Concept:
Goals
product:
marketing analysis - who you are selling to, is there a market for it, who is your competition - what makes you different.

Concept: improving processes. Instead of an ngo or business having to hire a fulltime person they can hire a consultant. what we can offer is a variety of expertise from addressing conflict in the workplace to expertise in a specific area - like the effect of water on conflict.
Each time we meet - twice a month - the group gets bigger. last time we met with six MBA students from GW who were interested in partnering up. They read our concept and other documents we had put together on the wiki site. We had some nice input from a professor to start the ball rolling. It also helps that people in the conflict resolution program have a variety of life experiences. They recommended we really hammer out "who are we" what is it that we are offering - study other groups to see what they are doing. And come up with a product - one girl recommended a training program. I thought this would be interesting. after all, after teaching english i could come up with my own lesson plans based on a template. a professor could help create the framework, and students could do the training. one of my interests in this group is to be able to participate before i am a certified "expert" with a PhD. the more practice you get - you become good at it. like giving trainings even if i didn't have the theoretical background to develop the blueprint. but hey, that's ok! other people didn't like the training idea saying that it should be the last thing we develop. We decided to go ahead.
There are now three teams working on different things: analyzing the competition, etc. our next meeting we want to have
"1. Identify 5 products : details, hours, deliverables, feasibility and revenue prospect
2. Draft a list of main competitors: name, location, contact info
3. Draft a value proposition: What can we do better than anyone else?
4. Participant Expertise: Years, industry, experience
5. Develop a guiding framework for our work: simple and applicable.
6. Compile a list of all of our own contacts within the industry that we are willing to share
7. Organizational Structure: Leadership, consulting teams, responsibility and team building"


The part that i am working on is product that we can offer relatively soon like trainings. We want five. I posted my training idea up on the site and they suggested that i go forward with it. which i am excited about.
"I also would suggest that you go forward with your idea as well. Put together some sort of deliverable, perhaps an HR best practices manual? Or perhaps a training seminar, where the deliverables would be a power point presentation and some sort of training binder complete learning modules and tests. What do you think?"
Done.