Design Workshop Facilitation
With my decade-plus of experience teaching yoga classes, trainings and workshops, I’m pretty comfortable facilitating group exercises. This has translated easily into moderating workshops with coworkers. I know how important it is to define a plan, articulate goals, and think through logistics ahead of time.
Sketching Ideation
My favorite type of workshop to facilitate is a sketching workshop. They are always a fun way to bring together cross functional teammates. These workshops get people more relaxed around each other, spur good conversations, and remind everyone they’re on the team to contribute ideas, not just to execute orders.
Sketching workshops revolve around a Design Brief, which summarizes background research and industry standards along workshop goals and design constraints. Here I share with you the process documentation for a workshop I facilitated to help the team ideate around solutions for new customer account activation, which had some tricky technical requirements to meet. Research informing the workshop was a usability assessment, comparative research
Affinity Mapping
Affinity mapping is another workshopping exercise I’ve utilized to promote collaboration among teammates. This format is a great strategy at the beginning of a design process. At that point, it’s most important to get the team articulating and organizing foundational assumptions and goals for a project. From there, we can prioritize concepts and goals to build out that initial roadmap of where we’re going.
Below is the documentation I created to run an Affinity Mapping workshop exploring project priorities for my assigned team in the coming year. I followed the usual affinity mapping workshop agenda, then added a prioritization exercise for a more meaningful organization of the results. The results generated during this time was the background for the roadmap and kanban board shown under “Process Management” on the Leadership page.
