Allocate Resources
Overview
Powernoodle offers groups an environment that encourages healthy debate about how resources (money, people, focus or a customized resource) are allocated across a number of projects or tasks. Allocating headcount across project activities, money among marketing campaigns or agreeing which strategic initiatives deserve the greatest focus are all great examples of how Powernoodle can be used for resource allocation.
Features & Benefits
The Powernoodle platform supports resource allocation through use of several key features:
- Buy-in and commitment is built when people are asked to analyze initiatives or alternatives, and then prioritize each of them.
- The prioritize step is very visual, providing an easy and intuitive method for working with a large group of people charged with allocating limited resources.
- Eliminates "groupthink" by only displaying results once prioritizing has been completed.
- Offers multiple resource types (dollars, headcount, focus and the ability to create a custom resource type).
- Set the amount of resources that each person can allocate and define the increments of spending.
- Detailed results and comments are automatically recorded in a spreadsheet.
- To ensure quality, consistency, speed, reach and cost-effective deployment, you can easily replicate and distribute resource allocation templates within the organization —or even externally.
Examples
Marketing strategies, human resource allocations, strategic focus, event budgets, project funding, grant distribution, floor space allocations, distributing gift funds, home or office floor space design, department budgets, people allocations to projects, research budgets, sizing effort, allocating costs, choosing strategies, allocating goodwill, sales quota distribution, channel expenses, allocate overhead, project estimates.
Evaluate & Assess
Overview
Evaluations and assessments are valuable processes to help judge, measure or appraise value, quality or ability. For example, an employee evaluation may measure performance against a number of job requirements. A project risk assessment estimates levels of risk involved in different aspects of a project. Powernoodle sessions can be used to develop tools that make these processes more effective and transparent.
Examples
Risk assessments, SWOT / PEST, judging and awards, employee assessments, team or peer evaluations, vendor evaluations, performance assessments, health and safety audits, compliance assessments, training evaluations, quality assessments, key performance indicator (KPI) assessments, technology audits, assessing strategic alternatives, vendor performance assessment, competitions, angel investors and startup funding evaluations, satisfaction assessments, competency assessments, grant recipient evaluations.
Features & Benefits
The Powernoodle platform incorporates key features that power evaluations and assessments:
- Multiple and single criteria rating tools.
- Set different weights to individual criteria.
- Provide participants with the rubrics or instructions for rating to ensure consistent evaluations by reviewers.
- Capture qualitative comments to enrich feedback and provide improvement suggestions.
- Anonymity means evaluations and comments are unfiltered and unbiased.
- Invite multiple virtual or in-person reviewers to collaborate on an evaluation.
- Detailed results and comments are automatically recorded in a spreadsheet.
- Evaluations and assessment templates can be easily replicated, then distributed for use within the organization or by external stakeholders. Besides encouraging consistency, quality, speed and reach, doing so contributes to a cost-effective deployment.
Feedback & Review
Overview
Because Powernoodle is anonymous, people are more likely to offer their “true” thoughts and impressions of a project, program or activity —participants are less likely to pull punches or to show bias based on personal or professional relationships. Anonymity makes it the ideal tool for asking stakeholders for feedback, providing feedback to others, getting input from a group about the merits of a project or initiative, or conducting surveys. The result is more insights and more reliable data; valuable information for future design considerations, marketing or replication purposes.
Features & Benefits
The Powernoodle platform incorporates powerful features designed to maximize the value of gathering feedback or conducting reviews:
- Sessions can be run asynchronously (no meetings required) saving time, accommodating busy schedules and increasing your group’s overall productivity.
- Because it’s anonymous, Powernoodle provides a safe environment for voices of dissent to collaborate. This helps build buy-in as well as encouraging transparency.
- Powernoodle’s accessibility and ease of use increases the potential pool of reviewers. People from many different stakeholder groups (including external) can be involved.
- Comments encourage people to provide different perspectives.
- Employing a standard approach for debriefing events, projects or programs increases quality of results while reducing effort.
- Provides you with a way to prioritize the feedback and allows you to use this information to run a problem solving session.
- Quickly replicate and distribute feedback and review templates within the organization (or externally). This promotes quality, consistency, speed, reach and cost-effective deployment.
Examples
Requirements gathering, focus groups, debriefing sessions, product reviews, lessons learned, feedback forms, book reviews, success stories, project review, program review, policy development, product requirements, employee feedback, strategy review, feedback loops, training reviews, coaching feedback, website reviews, recommendations, contract reviews.
Organize & Plan
Overview
Powernoodle can be used to help groups quickly organize and plan various projects, programs or initiatives. The Categorize step can be used to sort related concepts or ideas, to keep track of a project’s progress, or to map out your next initiative. The comments area on each sticky note can become a way to capture a list or common data.
Features & Benefits
- A wide range of people can work together to organize vast amounts of information, quickly and efficiently.
- The Powernoodle report can be updated frequently to capture different different stages of planning.
- Sticky notes can be moved from category to category providing participants a fluid and visual way to represent workflow, tasks or even approval steps.
- Comments can be used by everyone involved to capture timely updates, lists of information or even structure data (such as addresses and phone numbers).
- The ability to replicate and distribute feedback session templates within the organization or externally ensures quality, consistency, speed and reach while promoting cost-effective deployment.
Examples
Group study notes, work assignments, group to-do lists, lifecycle management, development backlog, bucket lists, workflow, volunteer signup, activity scheduling, procedure templates, feature scheduling, maintenance schedules, reading lists, organize life, project assignments, homework schedule, school calendar, responsibility assignments, product feature lists.
Problem Solve
Overview
Powernoodle provides a flexible platform for collaborative problem-solving. In a Powernoodle session, the organizer defines a problem and the group brainstorms creative solutions in an anonymous process that allows the ideas with the most merit to rise to the top. People are invited to contribute ideas, and the group then filters, votes, rates and prioritizes these to create a set of next actions.
Features & Benefits
The Powernoodle platform provides a number of key features aimed specifically at helping groups with problem solving:
- Involve many people to gain deeper perspective and increase creativity.
- Step-by-step guided approach keeps everyone on track and gets the problem solved quickly.
- Three separate evaluation methods: Voting, Rating and Prioritizing to narrow down the best solution.
- Easily categorize related concepts or ideas.
- Reset steps to try different approaches to the problem.
- The Powernoodle report can be updated frequently to capture the current state of the problem solving process.
- Run a session over an extended period of time.
- Replicate and distribute your problem solving templates within the organization or externally to ensure quality, consistency, speed, reach and cost-effective deployment
Examples
Gap analysis, product innovation, root cause analysis, visioning, SWOT, PEST, impact analysis, brainstorming, assumption questioning, improvement problem solving, appreciative inquiry, critical thinking, reflective problem solving, constraint analysis, visualization, causes and interactions, deductive reasoning, cost benefit analysis, problem breakdown, inductive reasoning, and 5 Why’s.
Knowledge Management
Overview
Powernoodle helps organizations capture, share and manage knowledge across their divisions or teams. By providing participants with the ability to anonymously add comments, Powernoodle fosters an environment in which the valuable knowledge accumulated by subject matter experts (SMEs) is shared, applied and enriched by newer employees. Conversely, anonymity ensures younger employees aren’t embarrassed to ask for help or to speak up to request clarification. Just like a wiki, the session can be left open indefinitely, providing a permanent reference to the issue.
Features & Benefits
The Powernoodle platform provides capabilities that fully support organizations with their knowledge management strategies:
- A session can be left open forever, providing a just in time training resource and knowledge repository.
- Anonymity means people can ask for help, seek advice or pose a question without feeling self-conscious or embarrassed.
- Because participants are not identified (personally or by department), turf wars, fiefdoms and silo mentality are replaced by an organizational perspective.
- Knowledge is easily organized and accessed by topic, question, category, idea or comments.
- Provides many-on-many coaching, eliminating the need to have a SME available to answer all the questions and challenges. This frees up the SME and prevents them from becoming a bottleneck.
- Content is captured in people's own words based on personal experience, making it an excellent source of training material for new employees.
- Powernoodle templates used for capturing, sharing and managing knowledge can be duplicated and distributed within an organization or with external partners. Doing so encourages consistency and quality, speed and reach, while supporting a cost-effective deployment.
Examples
Program management, technology deployment, best practices, just in time (JIT) learning, group coaching, collaborative book writing, process deployment, subject matter expert sharing, policy deployment, communities of practice, questions and answers, sales coaching, research collaborations, many on many coaching, gathering knowledge, new employee orientations, asset mapping, mentoring, distance coaching, “how to” recommendations.