Quality Jam

Quality Jam is a Business Process mirror, offering of three interrelated exercises that focus on wider organisational issues.

Number of Participants: 6– 21

Running Time: 90 Minutes

Key Benefits

• Applicable to most team environments
• Meets a huge variety of learning outcomes
• Easy to use and versatile
• Constituent parts can be played as games in their own right
• 3 Complementary Business Mirrors in one package

Main Concept

Quality Jam is a composite exercise. By using three different Business Mirrors, it enables users to efficiently assess and prioritize tasks within a team environment.

Each individual contributes specific components which are required to complete tasks. These tasks are the responsibility of other teams. The components are the specific 'property' of the person who is issued with them and cannot be transferred to, or handled by, anyone else at any stage in the exercise. Therefore, no task can be completed in isolation meaning overall project planning is required alongside a willingness to operate flexibly and respond quickly to the needs of others.

Quality Jam

• Promotes assessment and prioritization of tasks
• Enables users to achieve multiple, interrelated tasks
• Develops knowledge, information & skill transfer in a team
• Illustrates the importance of flexible manpower and resource management

Quality Jam reflects situations in which particular knowledge, skill or access to resources and information lies with a limited number of people within a system.

Built-in reviews of the exercises make participants aware of ‘the bigger picture’ and promote recognition of greater or more urgent needs within the organisation, and ways in which they allocate and re-allocate resources according to changing circumstances. Quality Jam also highlights issues which are involved in integrating different parts of a complex system, and coping with the effects of problems or delays in one part of a system which have a knock-on effect on other systems at a later date.

Quality Jam comprises the following learning tools- Cubism and Shelving:

Cubism

Combines two applications into one package. Focuses upon interdependence, specifically a participant’s ability to share and cross reference information. Development of support networks, conflict management and leadership in a group is also undertaken. Cubism in both its forms provides a fast route to powerful and transferable learning.

Shelving

Shelving is a group problem-solving exercise which requires an initial strategy to be developed, a period of trial and error testing and a refinement of a detailed implementation plan. It highlights the importance of individual contributions to group task achievement.

3-D Polygons - Shapes and Plans

A group exercise for addressing the construction/problem solving aspects of projects. Focus is on team building and the development of strategy planning and implementation.