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The Nominal Group Technique
You might need to use the nominal group technique as you’re gathering requirements in your project, and also arranging requirements and arranging solution ideas within your scope management process.
What is the nominal group technique? It’s basically a structured form of brainstorming which helps us gather ideas. It also helps us see what the most important ideas to work on, as it enhances brainstorming with an anonymous voting process used to rank the most useful ideas for further brainstorming or prioritization. Our most important ideas are the ones that receive the most votes during this anonymous voting process.
The nominal group technique consists of four steps. The first one is we pose a question or a problem to the group. For example “How do we solve this problem?” or “What are the requirements that you have out of this particular project or process?” Each person silently generates and writes down their own ideas. And this is a really important because it just stops one person or two people who everyone looks up to from being copied or followed. This is a way of getting around that so everyone gets a more even say, no one has influenced it in any way before they get to generate their own ideas.
So it’s a much more pure form of brainstorming. Now the moderator or the facilitator role that you’ll see come up in Agile a lot – and it’s a very important part of almost all of these processes – he or she will write down those ideas on a flip chart, on the wall, on a whiteboard or whatever until all of those ideas are recorded. Now then each idea is discussed until all group members have a clear understanding.
Some of the ideas might be the same or very similar, maybe a few relate to one particular idea. We can start to group the similar ones together. Now once we’ve got those groups then individuals vote privately to prioritize those ideas.
So you can either close your eyes and put your hand up, or you can just write down on a slip of paper and give it to the moderator or facilitator. Maybe this one gets four votes, this one gets two votes, this one gets five votes, then we might go with those ideas with the most votes.
It’s easy to do, if you just look at a scale of 1 to 5, one might be the lowest and five might be the highest priority that you could put during the voting process. You might do it in many rounds to reduce and focus in on ideas. So if you’ve got lots and lots then you can reduce them down. You’ve got 20, then you do another voting process and now you’ve just got one main one of the end after each round of votes are tallied and the highest-scoring ideas are selected.
And that is the nominal group technique.
– David McLachlan