Managing multi-disciplinary challenges
In the workshop with the ReDI-School NRW team
at @Startplatz in Düsseldorf, we dealt with the challenges that managers face every day. We focused on the problems and issues, which were backed up with concrete examples from everyday life in the course programme.
Venue
The start-up incubator and accelerator STARTPLATZ in the heart of the Rhineland start-up scene in Düsseldorf
Workshop topics
- Collaborative practice and clear communication
- Clear definition of tasks and responsibilities
- Clear goals, objectives and strategies
- Recognition of and respect for the competence & contribution of each team member
- Competent leadership
Challenges
What kind of challenges do you tackle every day as a manager? Please describe your problems & concerns as precisely and in detail as possible, also with day-to-day examples:
- Running multiple projects at once, splitting priorities
- Communication aspects with students and associates
- Bringing people along to invest full into attending classes and participating
- Meeting everyone’s expectations: having 150+ students, each with their own character and background
- Finding the right teaching methods, instructional materials, and assessment techniques
- Measure student outcomes, evaluate teaching methods, and gather feedback to continuously improve program quality
- Choose appropriate assessment strategies that accurately measure students’ knowledge and skills
- Managing over 100 volunteers: Hard to motivate them besides their daily work
- Dealing with students & teachers and supporting them remotely sometimes become tricky and challenging
- Sharing technical ideas within the non-technical team is also another difficult task
- Need to take on multiple responsibilities outside of my core role, which affects my performance
- When I describe a project, everyone understands it differently
- Clarification of the requirements for the possible outcome and align on planning and task distribution
Clustering of topics
In order to deal with the above-mentioned daily management challenges in a well-structured way, we discussed and sorted them in the team and thus formed focus clusters to be dealt with. These focus clusters were then individually weighted and prioritised by all participants.
Participant feedback
What did you like about the workshop?
- The engagement activities and the expertise of the facilitator
- I enjoyed learning about Thomas, discovering some interesting points that go into projects
- Exemplary explanation on improving the communication within in team
- How practical it was, Thomas’s experience and how he integrated it into the PM aspect
- We never had a time to have deep discussions and talk about our management challenges in detail
- It was also useful to learn some technical terms and examples from Thomas
- Expertise of the facilitator, learning technical terms and examples from the facilitator
- The opportunity to have deep discussions with the team about management challenges in detail
- Learning about different management types, techniques, and tools
What did you learn from the workshop and what action do you take?
- New project management types, techniques, and tools. Implementing that in my work
- I learned how many different things go into a project, the steps and procedures really add up
- How to approach certain aspect in my daily work more easily and with more understanding
- Learn about the different aspects of project management and get to know how to successfully accomplish a project to get desirable and productive results
- Actions: Focus on precise and to the point conversation, ask questions if you are not getting someone’s point clearly, make notes of everything to not get lost in multitasking, Set your priorities.
- When we place a requirement, it should contain completeness, unambiguity, consistency and verifiability. Especially I will take action to avoid ambiguity when I place a requirement.
- Gained a better understanding of the different aspects of project management and how to approach them effectively
- Learned new project management types, techniques, and tools, and will implement them in my work
Video impressions
Testimonial
“Thank you Thomas for introducing methods and sharing your examples to tackle on complex challenges we face at ReDI School. Thank you for your support @rotarykoeln Rotary E-Club Köln” ~ Takuya Furukawa, ReDI School NRW, Düsseldorf
Takuya Furukawa | ReDI school of Digital Integration, Düsseldorf
Further information
ReDI School NRW
www.redi-school.org/redi-school-nrw
Rotary Cologne
