This email is part of a larger series on Running effective accessibility workshops.
Last week, I talked about what it means to develop an idea by first clearly defining the problem. Only after you have your problem clearly defined can you move on to building a plan and figuring out how to solve it.
Here's the thing. All this time, I've been claiming that workshops are better than meetings simply because they're a faster and more enjoyable method to get to a result that everyone agrees with. And that's key. Because if nothing happens as a result of the workshop, then you've wasted all that time, no matter how much fun you had.
This is where the action plan comes in. This is the last stage of an effective accessibility workshop and it's also where you get to tie everything together. The output at this stage is an action plan that everyone agrees is likely to solve the problem you've clearly defined previously.
At its core, an effective action plan consists of just three things: who does what by when. With the problem clearly defined, you need to see what needs to be done, who will do it and when they expect to have it done.
I've ran entire workshops just around coming up with an action plan for a problem. The truth is, you can spend anywhere between a full day to just under 20 minutes to figure this out. So I'll give you the 20 minute version.
The exercise is called The three ones.
Here's how you play it.
- Time needed: 20 - 30 minutes
- Participants: 4 to 20
- Materials: Sticky notes and markers
You, or the facilitator, should introduce the game by saying:
We're going to play a game called The three ones. The purpose of the game is to come up with an action plan for our problem. We're playing this game because we want to have a roadmap of who has to do what by when to test our our theory that we can solve the problem at hand.
And then start explaining the steps of the game:
- You'll see on the white board there are three columns. The first column is labeled One day, the second One week and the third One month.
- We'll start with the first column. I want you to each write down one idea on a post it note of what you could reasonably do in one day to move the needle towards solving the problem. You'll have 2 minutes to do that.
- Then we'll move to the second column. What could you reasonably do in one week to get the problem closer to a solution. You'll have 3 minutes.
- In the third column, write down what you could reasonably do in one month to solve the problem. You'll have 4 minutes.
You can then spend 2-5 minutes for each column to ask for volunteers to pick up one of the ideas and run with it for the next one day, one week and one month. You'll naturally want to discuss available resources, or even pair up and work on some tasks together. That's great!
The three ones is a quick and dirty way to have a list of tasks assigned to people in the team with pre-defined milestones when you reconvene and check the progress. Not to mention the tasks you come up with are ready to be fed into your project management software, where you can formally track the progress.
Of course, it's good practice to follow up on the action plan at the predefined milestones to see that everyone is moving along and that the plan is actually being carried out. I like to schedule the followup sessions at the end of the exercise, when I already have everyone in the room and their level of enthusiasm is high.
Perhaps the followup session and how to handle that should be the topic for next Wednesday.