Focus Groups

Our focus group work is generally for idea generation, strategy & project planning, or project reviews.  However, a focus group can be useful anytime when you need to discuss, clarify and/or decide on a new idea or direction for your business.  Our focus group sessions are designed to.

  • Encourage equal participation and discussion from all participants
  • Develop a climate of fun and trust so that people feel comfortable about being open with their views
  • Keep the discussion on topic and on time
  • Help the group prioritize, classify, and analyse the key points of the discussion.
  • Identify an action plan to take away from the meeting
  • Clearly document all results from the focus group.

Although you are the experts in your content area, it is often useful to have an independent person act as a “sounding board” to help clarify your team’s ideas.

Idea Generation

Bringing the team together to generate ideas for new products, services, or processes can be a great way to kick off an improvement initiative.  Idea generation focus groups are taught on our One Bite at a Time program.  If you want to generate some new ideas with your team, download our free eBook on the Innovation page.

Strategy and Project Planning

Focus groups can be very useful to answer the simple questions such as: who are our customers, what do our customers want, and what services do we provide for our customers.  However, these questions are often not that easy when a group of managers come together to discuss them!

Examples of recent strategy focus groups we have conducted for clients include the ANZ Global Learning organisational strategy, City of Boroondara Process Reengineering Project and ANZ Governance off-site strategy sessions.

Project Reviews

Project Review sessions bring key project stakeholders together to discuss key aspects of the project.  What happened?  What worked well?  What didn’t work well?  What lessons can we learn and how can we incorporate these into a Lessons Learned knowledge base so that future projects can benefit from them.  Our main client for this work has been the Department of Defence for whom we have run frequent Lessons Learnt reviews of their combat self-protection projects.