A new type of makerspace
War rooms are a different example of a makerspace. War rooms can be used in both corporate and educational settings.
What are war rooms and why use them?
According to Wikipedia, a war room is any place that is used to provide centralized command for some purpose. Historically the term war room has been associated with military operations however the term can also be used in political, business and educational scenarios. In a political sense, the term “war room” is also often used to refer to teams of communications people who monitor and listen to the media and the public, respond to inquiries, and synthesize opinions to determine the best course of action.
A war room approach is well suited to industries and educational settings where coordinating teams and resources is critical. More recently war rooms are growing in popularity for defining business strategies, driving business initiatives, trouble-shooting solutions to critical issues and fast-tracking team activities to meet highly compressed schedules.
What do war rooms have to do with education?
War rooms are highly relevant to educational settings and can be used in a number of ways. Here are a few specific examples:
- In corporate training war rooms can be an effective means to brainstorm software courseware development issues as these collaborative spaces frequently include a courseware developer, a subject matter expert (instructor or developer), the IT project manager, and sometimes even a participant from the sales arm of the organization.
- War rooms are a highly effective way for groups to brainstorm certification exam questions.
- Post-secondary departments can utilize war rooms to debate and finalize class curriculums.
- War room approaches can be used to sequester educational colleagues in order to provide intense program capstone experiences.The Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University offers such an opportunity with their annual Bowen Island Weekend Retreat Capstone where graduate students present final projects and reflect together on their collective and personal experiences over the course of their program.
What does a successful corporate war room look like?
One of the best ways to envision a corporate war room is to peek at an example.
Matrix Group
The Matrix Group International is an Arlington, Virginia-based full-service web solution provider. They offer design and development, integration and as well as hosting solutions.
According to their Website:
“Matrix Group International is a leading interactive agency in the Washington, D.C. area serving associations and non-profits. Using state of the art Web technologies, we help clients promote their organizations to different audiences, raise awareness of their issues, manage complex databases of people and knowledge, increase sales of products and services, and streamline internal business processes.”
Matrix Group works with over 130 organizations nationally.
Take a few minutes and watch this short video where a Matrix project team discusses their experience using war rooms.
How do you create a war room?
We’re glad you asked! One of the first considerations is whether you require a physical war room, a virtual war room, or a combination of the two. To get started, ask yourself the following questions:
- How urgent is the situation/issue to be addressed? In other words, how long do you have to set up the war room and how long with the war room be needed for? Does this approach make sense?
- What resources (personnel) and equipment needs to be present in the war room?
- Where are these resources currently located? In the same office? In the same city or country?
- What would be the expense involved with bringing the team together to one physical setting? Is this feasible?
- Is there a suitable (size, location etc.) physical space available that can be set up as the war room?
- If you answer the above questions and virtual participation is required, does the team have access to reliable audio/video/web conferencing tools at an acceptable cost?
- If the tools are available, is the team familiar with their use? If not, how long will it take the team to ramp up on the selected tools?
Depending on the answers to these questions, you can determine if a physical, virtual or combination war room is needed.
Setting up a physical war room
According to the Matrix Group, here are some tips for setting up a physical war room successfully:
- Make sure the right people are in the war room. For example, we find it helpful to always have a front-end developer in the room because they can handle so many tasks and can address the CSS issues that sometimes block developers.
- Establish a deadline and a set of goals so the team has a clear idea of what they need to get done, broken down by day and week.
- Free up people’s schedules so they can spend time in the war room uninterrupted; it’s too distracting if people have to get up and leave all the time to sit in meetings or take calls.
- Keep the team well-nourished with snacks. Don’t forget healthy alternatives!
- Make sure the collaborative space is big enough and well-lit so that the team doesn’t feel like they’re in grim, cramped quarters.
- Set up the room with good technology (monitors, good chairs, etc.) so that staff doesn’t feel like they’re giving up the benefits of their own space.
- If you’re the manager, you should probably be in the war room as well. At the very least, spend part of your day in the war room or check in regularly.
Setting up a virtual war room
Web conferencing solutions allow teams to conduct real-time virtual collaboration sessions. Audio can be provided through the computer or mobile device by use of VOIP (voice-over-IP) or sometimes by an integrated phone audio solution.
There are a number of virtual conferencing products available to allow virtual teams to meet and collaborate. View this product placement video to get an overview of some of the features that you can consider when selecting a conferencing product.
Wikipedia provides an excellent product comparison chart for those who would like to review these products in more detail.
Discussion: In your professional setting have you participated in a war room? If so, can you describe the task that the team was addressing and how the approach worked.
Discussion Summary: Based on the ETEC522 2013 Winter Term 1 cohort discussion regarding professional settings where the cohort has participated in a war room environment, some of the tasks that the teams discussed included:
- Revamping the Computer Department’s school curriculum to match the new government’s education mandatde
- Dealing with student discipline problems and trying to determine the root causes, and come up with strategies to try to deal with the behaviors
- Getting a tender proposal finished for a deadline which requires collaboration of a few people
- IT environments where the war room was used for discussing day to day activities, training, feedback and also for “Forced Fun” which is time dedicated to a relaxing activity
- Schools preparing for accreditation
- Fighting forest fires, where war rooms called command centers are used
- Interactive agency topics in the pre and post dotcom days
Please view the cohort experience in the comments below. If you are accessing this OER after November 3, 2013, you are welcome to further contribute to the discussion.
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I would like to think I’ve been in a war room a few times in my current school. The computer department was put in a room for a couple of days to insure we revamped the curriculum to match the new government’s education mandate. There were 4 teachers and 1 administrator that came in every now and then to guide the conversation. After 2 days of snacks, no classroom responsibilities we managed to complete every task. It was important that we were all professional, good listeners and open to other peoples ideas. Without that communication piece, I could imagine war rooms being a very uncomfortable environment.
Thank you for sharing your war room experience. You have noted some important factors about wars such as that they are often put into play when teams need to tackle specific finite tasks, that war room teams are often shielded from competing tasks that will distract and derail their efforts, and that communication is pivotal to their success. Thanks again!
We routinely use the “war room” model in my school to deal with discipline problems. Teachers of a problem student, along with administration, meet in the conference room to discuss the issues, try to determine the root causes, and come up with strategies to try to deal with the behaviours.
We have had great success with these meetings, as everyone is directly involved with the concerned student and is genuinely concerned with how to positively affect their behaviour.
Jason – You raise an interesting application of the war room approach. The parallel case in heath care applications is the clinical care team (primary care nurse, physician, physical therapist e.t.c.) coming together to coordinate efforts on patient care. Thanks for expanding the discussion.
Professionals blocking out calendars and hunkering down in a ‘war room’ for a period of time sounds great .. so long as everyone is free of competing priorities for that time. I relate to a ‘project team’ such as that demonstrated in the video and how it might work for course development in an educational institution where IT, instructional design, SMEs, content developers and perhaps marketing need to work together. However, practically, in a commercial organisation, this type of ‘co-habitation’ would only occur for sessions of an hour or few hours at a time (e.g. courseware validation sessions). There is just too much pace to business and too much multi-tasking for people to ‘shut off in a room’.
I do like the term ‘war room’ though, and think it conjures up notions of rigorous debate, which is a good thing.
I think there’s a bit of a stretch from makerspace to war room in a corporate workplace. Project teams are the norm in corporations and even then, they don’t work together and may not even sit anywhere near each other, and come together just for the occasions when there needs to be consensus on something or a strategy clarified.
Thanks for joining this discussion thread. I can appreciate that proposing war rooms as an example of a makerspace will be debatable for some. However, depending on the nature of the activities taking place in the war room and the reason for bringing the team together, I believe that a good argument can be made for the war room as a type of makerspace. If “creative making” of a key deliverable is required, especially with a compressed project schedule, in my experience the need to isolate the key project team members from competing priorities is exactly why a war room is often set up.
Sure. For something ‘urgent’, like getting a tender proposal finished for a deadline which requires collaboration of a few people, a war room could be set up to take the relevant people ‘off line’ for a time to focus on the urgent project. To me, it’s just a different type of Makerspace to others mentioned in this topic because no organization is founded in order for the space/equipment to be used; it already exists. Interesting that these types of spaces have the word ‘war room’.
Having work for a number of year with Apple, the war room approach has been used in discussing day to day activities, training, feedback and also for “Forced Fun” which is time dedicated to a relaxing activity. These different activities lasted for differing amounts of time and allowed open and honest conversations to happen.
Thanks for sharing your Apple experience. The forced fun application of war rooms is one I’ve also seen. Burnout is a large problem in the tech industry and some teams are better than others at taking time to recharge their batteries.
War-rooms seem well suited to the demands of important tasks that need completion within a short time period and require the input of a range of skill sets.
David – You’ve provided a really good summary of war room usage. Thanks for posting!
I have experienced a war room of sorts. My last school was preparing for accreditation and we met every day, all day, for a week in the gym. It was mandatory and every single member of faculty had to be there. It would have been a great space to get things fixed but people took suggestions too personally and it was a rather negative experience. Too much yelling it was like a literal war room. However, I can see how the right group of people could turn the space into a productive one. I think it would need an objective moderator though if it began to turn hostile.
Although my experience with this type of environment is not directly related to education, I have been involved with this type of operation on several occasions. In my summer job, fighting forest forest fires, war rooms are called command centers, and they are nothing short of mind blowing. Each fire, small and large, has command team that is connected to a zone, which is connected to a region which is connected to central command in Victoria. Each command center is in fact part of a very fluid, yet well defined network of war rooms. What is mind blowing about this system is the efficiency with which the information travels and decisions are made. The particularity of this type of operation is that the goals are very clear, and decisions are based on facts and procedures, there is no room for debate or personal agenda, the hierarchy in the decision making process is well established and respected by each player.
I can’t help compare my summer job experience with my job in education, and the long staff meetings where some relatively minor issues are discussed for a long time, often without finding a solution. In addition to your suggestion to put the right people in the war room, I would suggest that the roles and responsibilities of the people in the war room need to be clearly defined.
I think than an incubation chamber, where the emphasis is on creating something new, is probably more closely related to a makerspace than a war room, where the purpose is to respond to an ongoing situation.
Sylvain – I completely agree with your comment “I think that an incubation chamber, where the emphasis is on creating something new, is probably more closely related to a makerspace than a war room, where the purpose is to respond to an ongoing situation.” Good examples of these types of war rooms is where a group of SMEs (subject matter experts) are brought together to design a course or to write a set of certification questions.
Amber – You make some good points about potential negative implications about using a war room and an objective moderator and clear line of command as Sylvan suggests below are key. I can’t say that I’ve experienced a war room setting where there was yelling and I can only imagine how unpleasant and unproductive that must have been.
I was involved in lots of war rooms, not in an educational setting so much as when I worked at a few interactive agencies in the pre and post dotcom days. In my experience, the war room meant 2 things: 1) the deadline was impossibly tight 2) the client was super important. If these two factors were present, a war room was created. A war room is a strategic business decision supported by upper management, as it means taking resources (people) off other projects and dedicating them to the war room project. In my experience, a lot of shuffling and negotiating went on between project managers so that key people could dedicate their time, uninterrupted, to the war room.
Everyone in this discussion has made excellent points in regards to the success of the war room, so I’ll only add two. In my context, the keys to success were:
1) The right people (skills), as well as the right number of people, need to be in the room for it to work. The biggest mistake is getting too many people in, as it can be chaos and is also hard for a large number of people to continuously, productively contribute. You end up putting a lot of effort into figuring out how to capture contributions in the most efficient and productive way. A better approach is to have a small core team and then bring others in as needed.
2) Take breaks: When you have only one thing on your schedule, the temptation is to power through, but humans can’t focus on one thing for 10 hours at a time (I’m sure there’s a study on this somewhere!) Quality and efficiency degrades quickly so, despite a looming deadline, breaks are actually time well-spent.
Setting up a war room to come up with innovative ideas to support students would be an amazing thing to be able to do on a regular basis. Unfortunately in the public school setting that I work in, our staff are often dispersed meeting different needs in the school and do not get enough time to get together to solve specific problems. This year, however, we were able to have meetings during the school day involving many different individuals on staff to discuss adaptations and modifications for students, in depth, prior to our formal IEP meetings. Strategies that came out of these meetings were designed to be proactive and to involve students’ strengths, as opposed to waiting and addressing challenges after they already arise. The result is that teachers and support staff are feeling more empowered to help set up increasingly individualized programming for students. I appreciated having this time to connect with teachers and support staff to tackle specific needs and to draw on the experience and strengths of everybody to move forward.
Alex – You make the point that “Strategies that came out of these meetings were designed to be proactive…” I’ve seen war rooms assembled to design new solutions or to “fix” issues however in addition to these results there are frequently proactive planning initiatives that result. This is a huge bonus that helps to offset the substantial cost/effort to put war rooms in place.
The use of war rooms in educational settings seems like it might be an effective and efficient way to advance the rate of change. It is evident to everyone in my institution that drastic change is required and there is a strong appetite for change among staff, students and parents. However, despite all efforts and intentions, the rate of change is agonizingly slow because of the many daily responsibilities competing for everyone’s time and attention. Perhaps providing rotating release time for different groups of people focused on specific tasks would produce better results faster than holding a series of voluntary open meetings, which are then debriefed at monthly staff meetings.
I have been involved in war room type scenarios when discussing technology additions for the college. As well, I have took part in actual war room settings while on exercise in the military. Every night we would hold briefings that involved section heads in preparation for the upcoming day. I found that this was similar to the section meetings held in my department. Decisions were made on how to deal with each student in providing accommodations.
Jen – Thanks for consolidating and adding to some of the themes discussed in this thread. In addition to having the right skill set available in the room you also make the important point of having the right number of people present. Recognizing that this requirement will change based on the task as well as other key variables, in your experience approximately how many is too many to have participate in a war room environment?
Hi Terri,
I think it depends entirely on the nature and size of task, as well as the skill sets of the people involved. I’ve gotten a lot done with just 2 people, and I’ve gotten just as much done with 6, and I’ve got nothing done with 12. I want to say around 4 is most efficient in my experience, but it really depends on the situation. What have you found works best?
Jen – I agree that the number depends on the nature and size of the task. For my company war rooms are quite often called “workshops” and there is always an effort to limit them to as few people as possible for both a cost perspective and a productivity perspective. In general 6 or 8 people is the minimum and they can range up to about 10 to 12 people. As has been mentioned a couple of times already in this thread in addition to numbers of participants, personalities are also vital. Some team members do not do well with the restrictions, physical and other, imparted by the war room approach.