Agile way of facilitating workshops

Over a period of time conducting various workshops and trainings, I always look for new and innovative ways to make them impactful and fun. I have seen (and also done) many agile trainings that follow a pattern of going through slides with few or no active engagement from the participants. Such workshops delivers the message but are not impactful as they follows a very waterfall-ish approach, such as

• no visualisation of progress
• Workshop requirements are fixed upfront, with no scope of change as per audience expectations
• Late feedback, mostly at the end of workshops after which things cannot be changed

Agile practices are based on the premise of experimenting (doing and learning) and so should be the case with learning about agility. This is an attempt to share my experience of facilitating workshops and trainings using agile values, principles and practices. For the audience, these aspects go beyond evangelizing agile and move towards utilizing it in every work we do and reap its value. So let’s look at some of the key elements which we can take care during a workshop.

• Customer Centricity: Using audience focused Epics/User Stories for describing the workshop topics
• Relative Sizing: Using Story Point estimation for sizing the workshop topics
• Flow & Visualization: Using Kanban/Scrum board during the workshop for visualizing progress.
• Track work remaining: Using burndown chart showing work remaining, monitor progress, predict problems and outcome. This helps in early course correction if needed during the workshop.
• Focus & Faster feedback loop: using sprints which allows limiting work in progress and focus on workshop subject. Also conducting retrospective during the workshop to capture early feedbacks.

Let’s look into some details

Customer Centricity

Once we are ready with the subject for the workshop, the next step is to define different topics which address the selected subject. It is very important to make sure that while defining these topics, we keep in mind the attendees who are the customer for the workshop. We typically define some high level epics and related user stories around the subject which we plan to cover during the workshop.

Some examples of high level epics and further breaking down into stories can be seen below:

Benefits:

• Helps in articulating the agenda and topic in a way such that the output are clear to everyone.
• Keeps the workshop focussed to the needs of the audience

Pro tip:

• Variable Scope: You can define a few epics which are "must" for the workshop and few a which are “nice to have”. Based on the feedback during the workshop, you can either skip some of these “nice to have” epics or replace them with something new which attendees are more interested in.

Relative Sizing

As a facilitator you can also do a relative story point sizing for your topics, which will help you understand the complexity and effort to spend on each topic.

Benefits:

• It helps you, as a facilitator to define logic stories which fits in each sprint and draw a burndown to monitor progress (I’m going to cover these topic little later in this article).
• Over the course of few workshops, empirically it helps you improve your estimations and hence plan/organise the workshop better.

Flow & Visualization

In our workshops, we sometimes use a visual Kanban board for visualizing the topics and how they are progressing. We typically use the following stages on the board

1. Backlog/To Do: a backlog of all the stories which needs to be covered during the workshop.
2. Breakdown (optional, based on the nature of workshop): stage to breakdown any larger topic into small and manageable topics.
3. Explain/Answer: stage to explain the topic and answer any queries around it.
4. Validate: check the satisfaction of the audience on the understanding of the topic.
5. Done: Stage signifying the topic is understood and complete.

Benefits:

• These visual board helps in making the workshop progress transparent and manageable

Track work remaining

If you size your topics/user stories for the workshop using story points, then using the burndown chart is of great value to monitor progress, predict problems and outcome. This insight helps the facilitator to take corrective steps to manage the workshop and audience expectations.

The X-axis defines the time/duration of the workshop and the Y-axis defines the story point. Based on the overall duration of the workshop you can use seconds, minutes or hours and plot the Story Point burndown for the whole workshop.

Benefits:

• The burndown helps you as a facilitator to track progress for the workshop and make informed decisions for course correction for the topics to cover in the workshop, i.e. add or remove topics based on the progress.

Focus & Faster feedback loop

During few workshops, we have experimented with the idea of running them in multiple small sprints and performing retrospective at the end of each sprint.

The concept of "sprint" brings a sense of focus by working on a single epic (and related stories) and also limiting "work in progress".

Conducting retrospective at the end of each sprint to get feedback from the audience and improve during the workshop instead of waiting for the complete workshop to end is a huge value proposition.

Benefits:

• The sprints bring an additional sense of focus on the topic and allows to park queries in the parking lot which does not belong to the sprint goal :)
• Regular retrospectives during the workshop at a logical interval keeps the communication channel open in both the directions and makes the workshop more interactive. It also facilitates the possibility of keeping the workshop audience focused (to their likes and dislikes) with continuous feedback from them. Some of the typical suggestions which came out of the retrospectives can be “use more/less videos during the workshop”, “perform more/ less activity based learning”, “increase/ decrease the pace of the workshop”, “more involvement of participants/facilitators”, etc..

You can be a Great Facilitator

Using these small tricks and techniques helps a lot in facilitating a workshop where everyone feels engaged and learn about agile while practicing it. It also showcases that agile is not only about software development but it adds value to our day to day work and hence leads by example for agile workshops and training especially :)

I have occasionally used one or more of these techniques based on the duration, format and content of the workshop and hence would advise to take your prerogative in picking up these for your workshops if you see some value addition.

What do you do?

What do you think is missing from my list? I’m sure you have more tricks under your sleeves worth sharing, so please go ahead and comment. Looking forward to reading up on your experiences and ideas.

Credits

• Thanks to Gaurav Punetha and Sorabh Kalra for helping me with the review of this article.

References

• I was inspired with the idea of using a visual board/Kanban for visualizing the workshop topic seeing Eric Brechner: "Agile Project Management with Kanban" | Talks at Google https://youtu.be/CD0y-aU1sXo