Facilitation, Consultations and Strategic Planning
Facilitation
RPI is skilled in planning and facilitating meetings, whether they are in person or online. Our approach to facilitation ensures that meetings remain focused on outcomes and are interactive and engaging. We work with our clients to create an agenda and process that creates a safe and supportive environment that gives all participants the chance to contribute to collective problem-solving and to find innovative solutions.
For virtual meetings and engagement processes, we use a variety of tools and strategies (e.g., virtual breakout rooms, online document sharing, collaboration, idea generation, and facilitation tools, real-time polls and surveys) to ensure that meetings are engaging and efficient. We synthesize findings quickly to allow our clients to move ahead with their work.
Strategic Planning
We help our clients identify their vision, and we guide their strategic planning process to produce a clear, concise, and practical framework for action planning. Building trust and commitment and improving communication among key stakeholders are fundamental to the strategic planning process.
Consultations
We have carried out consultations in the public, private, and non-governmental sectors. These consultations have helped to inform the development of policy and programs and gathered input for needs assessments, evaluations, and strategic plans. We use a range of methods to gather data during consultations. Examples include interviews, focus groups, story sharing, and surveys.
We work with our clients to clarify the purpose of the consultations and identify the individuals or groups who should provide input. We use rigorous methods to ensure we collect high-quality data. We can present consultation findings in the form our clients choose, including written reports and presentations.
Sample Projects
The Department of Labour and Advanced Education proposed changes to the Workers’ Compensation Act to help emergency response workers diagnosed with PTSD get access to workers’ compensation benefits. The Department hired us to consult with key stakeholders on the proposed legislation.
We
- designed the consultation approach using the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) principles and approaches;
- developed data collection tools (focus group and interview guides, an online tool for written submissions);
- conducted all consultation activities; and
- analyzed the findings and integrated them into a report.
This was a highly charged and controversial topic for some stakeholders. Our experienced facilitators used a range of techniques to make sure all participants felt safe and had the opportunity to share their perspectives during the consultation.
We worked with Dalhousie’s Department of Family Medicine on their five-year strategic plan. Our work included conducting an environmental scan of strategies from other jurisdictions and interviewing external stakeholders, as well as consulting with faculty and staff to help identify strengths, challenges, and opportunities.
We worked with senior leaders to create the final strategic plan and supported working groups to develop operational plans, which outlined detailed actions, accountability, resources, timelines, and indicators of success. We also developed an accountability framework to help monitor implementation of the operational plans.
The accountability framework included a reporting template for working groups to update the status of actions in the operational plan. We reviewed and analyzed the status reports and developed a progress report for the department.