To benefit from the program, you should have a specific problem or decision in mind. To be most useful, you should choose a decision which you are about to make. To keep that problem or decision firmly in mind, you may wish to write it down in a few sentences. If you are having difficulty in doing this and would like help in framing your problem, click Framing the Problem.
Next identify a group that you might wish to involve in the process of solving the problem or making the decision. If you are a manager, it may be a group made up of your direct reports, peers, or even vendors or customers. It is helpful to choose the group which is most relevant to this problem in the sense that they possess relevant knowledge or are going to be significantly affected by the action taken. If there is more than one such group, you may wish to run the analysis more than once with different groups in mind.
In some instances one is faced with a situation in which there is a need to create a group. That is, the groups which currently exist within the organization are not adequate to solving the particular problem. If that is the case, your task would be to select the members for the team, task force, or committee. In doing so, you may wish to examine considerations that may be useful by clicking on Team Formation.
Once you have a problem and a specific group of potential participants in mind, you are ready to begin — just click Situation Analysis.