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Group Creativity Techniques

Using group creativity techniques

You can use mind mapping, brainstorming, or the nominal group technique on its own. Or you can combine two or more techniques. But using each technique in sequence is a good way to get as much feedback from stakeholders as possible about their requirements. Ultimately, this can go a long way to ensuring a project succeeds.

Mind mapping

A mind map is useful because it brings together a lot of ideas. It groups these ideas visually to make it clear how they relate or differ. At the center of the map is the problem to be solved. As you think of ideas, you build branches out from the center. Each branch groups related ideas. At the end of each branch, you get to specific ideas that develop from more general ones.

When you're collecting project requirements from a group of stakeholders, the specific ideas you want to get to at the end of each branch are project requirements. Take a project like recruiting qualified candidates for new job positions. In a mind map, you might move from a general idea – marketing your company to candidates – to more specific ideas about what kind of marketing is needed.

You could have a group of stakeholders create a mind map together, or work in smaller teams to create a few mind maps. The best method, though, is to have each person in the group create their own map. As a facilitator, you then combine the ideas in the separate maps into a single map. This makes sure everyone has a say, and shows how everyone's ideas fit together.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a great way to generate an unstructured list of possible project requirements. This is because it encourages everyone in a group to have their say. And what one person says often inspires someone else with a new idea.

For a brainstorming session to work, it's important to follow four rules:

1. identify the objective or problem – although brainstorming isn't very structured, its focus must be clear
2. record all the ideas stakeholders come up with so no good ideas are lost
3. make sure nobody criticizes other people's ideas – this can cause conflict and keep people from having their say openly
4. encourage everyone to build on other people's ideas

One especially effective strategy is to use brainstorming after you've already created a mind map. This way, everyone can focus on clarifying the early set of requirements. The purpose of the session will be clear, so it's more likely everyone will have productive ideas.

The nominal group technique

The nominal group technique is a way you can help a group of stakeholders identify which requirements are the most important for a project. The technique can include brainstorming ideas and then ranking them. Or, if you've already used techniques like brainstorming, it can involve ranking a list of possible project requirements that you've already put together.

An advantage of the nominal group technique is that it lets each stakeholder in a group have a say about what's most important to them. Another advantage is that this can happen without leading to conflict. The way people rank their requirements can even stay secret.

The way you use the nominal group technique will vary depending on what information you're trying to gather. If you're trying to refine a list of possible requirements you've already collected from stakeholders, the best way to use the technique is to follow these steps:

1. have the full list of possible requirements you've already gathered in front of the group of stakeholders
2. ask each person to rank their top five or so requirements
3. have group members call out the requirements and their rankings, and write down these rankings – optionally, have members exchange cards before doing this so their choices stay anonymous
4. tally the results for each requirement on the starting list, and identify the requirements with the highest scores

It's important that if you use a scoring system, you have each person assign the highest score to the most important requirement. If group members rank their top requirement as 1 and their least important requirement as 5, the scoring wouldn't work. This is because the most important requirements would have low scores – but so would requirements nobody voted for at all.

Group creativity techniques help you guide stakeholders in generating, refining, ranking, and approving the requirements for a project. These techniques include mind mapping, brainstorming, and nominal group technique.

Using each technique in sequence can ensure you obtain as much information from stakeholders as possible during the Collect Requirements process.