FAQS
Frequently asked questions about delibera
1. What is the difference between delibera and other communication and collaboration business tools?
Both type of tools cover necessary but different activities.
Email and tools like Slack, Yammer, Chatter, etc. are designed to exchange information, manage tasks and organize team work. But participants’ contributions follow a timeline, which makes these tools inadequate to maintain complex conversations in a collaborative way and think together in an organized manner.
Delibera covers this need, structuring key conversations and organizing contributions by their sense and quality.
It achieves this through smart deliberation templates, structured according to the objective pursued: ask for a YES/NO, prioritize a list of options, ask for feedback, follow-up on initiatives... the conclusions and decisions are always formalized and clear.
Each type of conversation requires an adequate structure to achieve the desired results. By structuring conversations, the quality of the interactions between people improves, going from a mere and basic exchange of opinions or debate, where some win and some lose, to a real deliberation which allows us to think and move forward together. Email and similar tools are good to communicate, but not to deliberate. Both are necessary activities, but different.
2. What added value does delibera give me compared to other survey tools that do offer some structure and are usually free?
Survey apps, like for example Survey Monkey, do offer templates with a certain structure, but in surveys each person responds individually and a deliberation between participants doesn’t happen. It’s only aggregated data gathered in an individual manner. It can be useful in certain circumstances to obtain a “picture” of the status of an opinion, but surveys don’t, by themselves, help us think and move forward together. Delibera adds value by establishing an intelligent conversation about opinions.
3. What value does delibera give me when following-up projects, initiatives, and commitments compared to project, task management, and other similar tools?
It helps you drastically reduce the number of follow-up meetings. How?
Tools like Asana, Trello, Wunderlist, etc. help a Project Manager organize task sequences, deadlines, and those members responsible inside their project.
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Delibera operates at a higher level, where leaders have several Project Managers and people with specific and important assignments under their responsibility. Through its templates, in particular the Follow-up (Commitment and Results), an agile and deliberative reporting is guaranteed, drastically reducing the great number of meetings that used to be needed to follow-up on projects. In this template, Project Managers report to the person who assigned them the project, synthesizing progress -with or without metrics-, stating if they have bottlenecks or need a meeting, and pointing towards corrective actions.
4. What value does delibera give me compared to other idea generation platforms?
Unlike platforms such as OpenIdeo, Ideas4all, InQbet… ideas in delibera can be organized according to categories, fixed by the sponsor of the conversation, and they can be better deliberated among all participants; in combination with other templates, ideas can be filtered, prioritized, and promoted across the organization for its transformation, with a process tailored to each type of problematic.
5. My organization (or the group with whom I would like to start using delibera) is not very “digital”, how can I make sure delibera is going to work? Do users need training?
Delibera is easy to use and doesn’t require any user training. It has proved its usability in all sorts of cases, independently of the profile of the group and the nature of the relationship between the organizations’ members. People receive an email notification and start participating. Each template has simple usage instructions but reading them is not essential. The platform is very intuitive. People discover and enjoy the structure naturally, and they can do so through any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile. As it is cloud software, only an internet connection is needed.
6. Who can or should open structured conversations with delibera in my organization?
For easiness of use, it is within the reach of anyone. Another issue is the optimal starting point in each organization. If the aim is to structure key conversations it is usual to begin with the leadership team, or a part of it, and afterwards let it cascade down to the rest of the organization progressively, as its use is discovered.
In some organizations, all users can open smart conversations from the beginning. It is a matter of people properly understanding the real value of a structured conversation, and knowing when to choose between sending an email or a delibera.
7. Is any training needed to open a structured conversation?
No. Opening a structured conversation is very intuitive and it takes more or less the same time as writing an email. To open a conversation, you just need to fill in the template (title of the conversation, description, invite participants, state a due date…). To do this no training is needed, and you can easily do so with the simple tutorials on the platform.
8. Is it convenient to train someone on how to use the tool within my organisation?
Yes, it is convenient, according to the nature of the position and responsibility of a person within an organisation.
Delibera offers short certification programs to get started in collaborative intelligence. Here we explain how to obtain the best results from each conversation and offer criteria on how to focus conversations, who and how many people to invite, and how long to keep these conversations open.
The basic digital certification for people who need to open important conversations and/or administrators takes around two hours and can be done by videoconference with the assistance of our experts.
9. With which type of conversations should I start to try delibera in my organization?
With any type in which there is a need to improve the interaction between people, especially in more complex and important conversations. In our homepage, you will find a list of uses and benefits of using delibera. Some uses are of a strategic nature, oriented towards thinking together and understanding where we are and where we want to go, making alignment of resources easier. Others improve and speed up daily internal interaction processes within the organization, making it more collaborative. And others are more organizational, aimed at creating a feedback and continuous-improvement culture, measuring and recognizing collaboration. You can start using the tool at the executive level, with a concrete challenge or project, or a specific area/department.
10. How do I know what is going on in within my conversations in delibera?
There is a tried and tested email notification system that tells you when others participate, when someone comments on your posts or mentions you, and it also keeps you up to date on the due-dates for each conversation, reminding you that your participation is important. All these notifications are completely customizable by you, including the possibility to set up aggregated summaries.
11. How does delibera work from an IT point of view? How can I hire it? What is the pricing?
Delibera is offered in a SaaS (Software as a Service) modality; it is hosted in the cloud, which means that we take care of everything to ensure that the final user does not have to do any software installation or maintenance by himself, taking advantage of regular updates automatically. Our servers are located at Amazon’s cloud (Amazon Web Services Ireland), and comply with top level security standards. The pricing model is a monthly fee per user. Pricing varies according to the number of active monthly users.
12. What do I have to do to start using delibera? How much time does it take to get it started? Are any system integrations necessary?
You can hire it immediately from the moment you contact us. You can use it without any type of integration, or you can do a Single Sign On integration if you want your users to log in with their corporate username and password. This on demand integration would imply 1-2 weeks of work from our technicians, depending on the features and requirements of your organizations’ systems, and it has a cost.
13. How do I invite someone to participate in a delibera conversation?
It is as simple as knowing his/her email and typing it in one of the steps when you create a conversation in delibera. The person will then receive an invitation to join. You can also invite people from outside of your organization if you consider it appropriate.
14. What security measures are in place at delibera that guarantee I can have my important conversations there?
We have invested heavily to make sure that delibera is a safe and completely reliable tool, successfully overcoming many security audits of the most demanding companies in the world. You can have the important conversations of your organization safely, always available, and supported by daily backups. They will be confidential, because thanks to our “multi-tenant” structure your data will be completely separated from other clients’ and will be accessible from a personalized URL. They will also be confidential because we encrypt data in transit via SSL / HTTPS security certificates, and at rest with disc, database and backup encryption. Lastly, integrity is guaranteed because we implement “audit-trail” mechanisms so we can reconstruct events and data if needed, and there is “segregation of duties” which means that administrators will not have access to your organizations’ conversations (unless explicitly invited).
Moreover, we also undergo security verification audits regularly as we are certified in the most rigorous international standards: ISO 27001 “Information security” and ISO 27018 “Personal data protection”. If you would like to learn more details about our security features click here or contact us.