Joint Agile Planning Recap - July 2022

Our fantastic club presidents with Phillip from Beaufort Rotary Club, and Melissa from Rotary Elizabeth Quay

Thanks to everyone who attended our first Agile planning session of the 2023 financial year! And our first ever joint Agile Planning session with the Beaufort Rotary club.

Melissa inducting our newest 2 members, Shane and Ruben

It was a great turnout, nearly 30 attendees from 4 Rotary clubs and even some guest attendees!

We would be amiss to not give a special mention to long-time Rotarian Erol from the east coast!

And to 3 of our newest inductees, Michelle toms, Shane Bartholomeusz and Ruben Proud, who all participated without hesitation and brought a great deal of value to the session, agile planning is such a vital part of what makes REQ so successful, so actively participation and engagement is critical.

Immediate Past President Nick with visiting Rotarian Erol, from the east coast

At the end of the day we had 5 fantastic events workshopped to be run over the next 6 months:

Craftanoon for a Cause fundraising series
Addiction and Support Information Event
Community Kite Fetsival for mental health
AYLA Blitz
Migrant Upskilling Workshops

(More details below!)

So what exactly is REQs agile planning?

Agile within the context of project planning and management has been a series of successful project management practices embraced by the technology community since 2001. Some popular PM frameworks or methodologies have been built on top of Agile, such as Scrum and Kanban.

Here at REQ, we use agile with some accompanying methods (such as the lean business canvas) to plan and run our events. Throughout the year we host an agile planning session, with the aim that our community comes together to blue-sky think, brainstorm and imagine ways we can make a difference through events or fundraising activities.

Run by master facilitator and immediate past president Mr Nick Lim, the event started with icebreakers and exercises to encourage and nurture creativity and collaboration

Ben (displaying catlike finesse) didn’t allow his injury to stop him from playing

This unfortunate squeeky hippo was used as a speakers totem and thrown around to each participant, who introduced themselves, gave a short background and said what they wanted to get out of the day.

Following icebreaking and introductions, Nick guided the group through an exercise where teams were formed and the teams would brainstorm ideas on how to align with 3 key pillars of running events at the individual level and the team level:

Being visionary and delivering on it
Staying fun and light hearted
Stepping into leadership

As well as a wildcard quadrant.

Some fantastic ideas and concepts came out

The next activity, was an exercise in blue sky thinking and was all about group ideation and feasibility evaluation.

All the participants had 1 minute to come up with a basic idea for an event and write it down on a piece of paper.

The paper was then passed to the next person who was responsible for fleshing out and adding some substance to the event idea.

The paper was passed one more time, to a third person, whose task was to critique and try to identify feasibility issues in the original and expanded ideas.

(Right to left) New member Michelle, REQ favourite Adam and REQ president Melissa represent their tables ideas for the crowd

After these three tasks, each table would discuss each idea, evaluating the value and feasibility, before collaboratively deciding upon one idea from the table to be put forward to a group discussion.

The group heard each of the nominated events, and then ordered them based on feasibility and value to their targeted beneficiaries.

Nick explains that low feasibility (or high risk) but low value are risky events to run, whereas some events really shone, and the group could see high value for reasonable feasibility or low risk.

These events made it through to the final activity of the agile planning day, the lean business canvas and event planning!

The lean business canvas?

The lean business canvas is a ‘1 page’ activity planning template that focuses on deriving and emphasising key information in a concise and efficient way. Often used to document business plans, REQ uses the lean business canvas during our agile planning sessions to workshop events.

The image below shows the fields REQ uses to discuss and workshop an idea into a tangible and achievable event.

Starting with the problem cell. Here we identify the problem to be solved, and the goal of the event.

In the case of the addiction event, the goal is to:

Educate people on the causes of addiction
What is the process of providing and receiving care (including self care)
Raising awareness of addictions that don’t receive a lot of attention (such as social media, tv and video games, pornography)

REQ treasurer David showing us how we are going to bring value to the AYLA foundation with the backyard blitz

The solution cell is potential avenues this event could solve the problem/achieve the goal. In this case we came up with the ideas of:

Information sessions/ workshops
Stories of addiction
3 speaker panel on 3 key areas of addiction help/treatment

Following the solution, we want to identify the key proposition of the event, what is the value for the attendees?

It wouldn’t be agile planning without some chuckles. REQ members: Adam, Stefanie, Ben, Ksenia and Beaufort Rotary Club immediate past president enjoying the lean business canvas a little bit too much

We identified that we wanted to:

Raise the awareness of addiction
Facilitate the ability for people to support their loved ones suffering addiction
And contribute towards a transparent and guilt free support environment for addicts

The next section is key outcomes, or what we want to achieve. For this, we specified:

Our favourite Rotary maverick, Matty Pham with Erol having some pizza and discussions

A greater understanding of addiction and usable techniques to deal & assist with addiction
Awareness of help providers
Greater understanding + less shame for addicts
Tangible next steps for addicts who want to recover
Learning to set healthy boundaries
Alternatives to self medication/learning how to cope
How to manage triggers
Learn to forgive addicts

Now that we have a goal, avenues, value proposition and key outcomes. We can start looking at the cost structure of the event. How will it be funded, run and is it a for-profit event? What are the financial considerations

For addiction we determined some ways of managing cost would be have:

Volunteer speakers
Utilise both written and presentation based resources

And the considerations for the event would be the venue, the speakers and the resources we provide.

With costs looked at, what are the revenue streams we can leverage to offset the costs? We identified

Ticket Sales
Venue donation
GoFundMe, with information packages sent out to backers who cant attend in person
Corporate sponsorship

The next section is the unfair advantage. What special relationships, skills or experience do you have to leverage that gives you an advantage when running the event?

Through Ruben, we have a relationship with Dr Stephen Proud, a respected addiction psychiatrist and the founder of both the Blackwood River Clinic, and the Abbotsford Hospital. Through the Rotary network, we have access to numerous other SMEs we can leverage.

So what channels can we use to promote the event and distribute any resources?

The speakers networks, as professional development credits may be applicable
Social media of the club, attendees and speakers
And web resources such as the ticketing website, newsletter and the website

Finally, we have an idea of the financials, the value, the content and the delivery, so who benefits from the event?

We think the carers, supporters and family members of addicts, as well as the community and people dealing with addiction themselves.

So that’s a summary of the lean business canvas, how REQ uses it for agile planning, and an example for an upcoming addiction event! But there were many great events organised this planning session. After each team completed their LBC, we walk through them all as a group to share and gain additional ideas

In the end we had 5 great events come out of the agile planning session:

1) Craftanoon for a Cause series (raising funds for different causes)

Painting
Stitching
Jelly art
Crafting

2) Addiction and Support Information Event

3) Community Kite Festival for mental health

4) AYLA Blitz

5) Migrant upskilling

CV’s

Interview skills

Networking advice

And then we all shared pizza and socialised!

Thank you for reading our summary of the awesome mid year agile planning session for 2022! We hope to see you at an event soon