Driving Innovation in Project Management

How Might We Make Projects Much More Exciting?

We ran a session at the ‘Driving Innovation in Project Management’ Forum, hosted by the Australian Institute of Project Management on 4 May 2016. As part the session, over 100 participants were provided with a sneak peek into IDEO’s ExperienceInnovation™ Simulation facilitated by the ‘Crazies’ team. Our design thinking challenge was, ‘How Might We make projects much more exciting?’ and the highly experiential session saw all participants roll their sleeves up and dive in with excitement to trial a number of human-centred approaches and techniques, including brain storming and story-boarding, to produce a series of innovative and responses, such as:

• Dressing up in costumes for themed team project meetings;
• Bringing kids to work and letting them make major project decisions;
• All project status meetings being delivered in song (to keep them short!);
• Cash payments for those whose projects generate benefits for the company;
• Holiday incentive trips for teams that produce successful project outcomes;
• Turning project planning into a big ‘snakes and ladders’ game to keep it fun.

And others that can’t be published!