How Case Swarm Works
A Swarm is a group of people, typically working in the same department or division (and who often, therefore, have similar functional roles within an organization), who come together in the Case Swarm platform for the purposes of exploring case studies together in a social fashion.
The Case Swarm platform is organized around 4 roles:
Swarm Administrator – an account owner, typically on behalf of a department or work team, a Swarm Administrator is responsible for recruiting people from their team into case study exploration. This person typically organizes payment and manages the roster of swarm members, and also has the authority to designate case authors and experts.
Case Author – a Case Author is someone within a swarm who has an interesting case study that should be explored. On login to Case Swarm, this person has privileges to “Build a Case”.
Case Expert – a Case Expert, needed only in the Expert Resolution mode, is someone within or added to a swarm who can provide a “best practice” solution to a case study being explored by a swarm.
Swarm Member – a Swarm Member has privileges to review case studies in which she or he has been invited to participate, with membership granted by a Swarm Administrator. A Swarm Member faces a series of questions about a case study; these questions either are part of the Case Swarm methodology, or reflect the work and thinking of a Case Author.
It’s really easy to use Case Swarm for exploring your business cases. Here is the “process” in brief:
A Swarm Administrator sets up a swarm – or a group of people who can collaborate in a guided fashion through resolution of a case study. The Swarm Administrator is flagged as the responsible party for providing payment for all swarm members
A Case Author, using Case Swarm tools, describes a case scenario and prepares questions for exploration.
A Case Expert, if assigned to a case leveraging the Expert Resolution Mode, provides best practice answers to questions about the Case Study.
A Swarm Member reviews each case study, answering questions posed by the Case Author, and gets to compare her/his answers to those of peers. Swarm members are also led through a process of reflection to resolution – and are provided opportunities to indicate how they will change their behaviour to address similar cases in the future.