Cracking the Lockdown Workshop

Workshops can be tricky to organise at the best of times, we often ask ourselves questions like; Do we have the right people in the room? Will participants be able to understand the task? Will the task enable us to unearth the right outcomes? 

These issues are amplified in the lockdown world we current live in but we have new challenges to navigate too; How do we run a workshop with 30+ people online? What tools can we use to facilitate workshop tasks? How will we keep everyone engaged? 

The plan

Myself and Emma van Dijkum wanted to run a workshop between Product and Design at Octopus to outline our ways of working between the two departments. We had 30+ participants, divided into 4 groups comprising of Product Owners, Designers and Developers working on 2 tasks; 

• Define the workflow for Product X to be delivered by the Product team
• Define the roles, responsibilities and remit of each member of the team (PO, Designer, Developer)

The structure

We arranged the workshop how you usually would in person with time allocated for intros, tasks, playback and wrap-up but we also used some great tools for 

• 10min Intro: Zoom call to introduce workshop, the brief and the task
• 25min tasks: “breakout room” Zoom call for each group to discuss and map workflows and roles using Miro
• 45min playback: return to main room of Zoom call to discuss workflows and roles of each group and then merge into one flow using Miro 
• 10mins wrap-up: agree outcomes and workshop wrap up

Tools

We arranged participants into groups before the workshop and used Zoom to manage the video call with different “breakout rooms” for each group, myself and Emma then jumped into the chat rooms to provide support while each group worked on the tasks. We used Miro to create one canvas with each team set up with their own area to add post-it notes to the board to define their process flow and responsibilities.

The groups created some great flows and lists of responsibilities for each discipline, which we've been able to action into an agreed process between all parties. Overall the workshop was a successful but could have improved by giving more time for the tasks as they can overrun more easily online than in person. It's also important to mention the ability to jump into different breakout rooms to help facilitate tasks and support groups, similarly to how you would do in person.

If you have any workshop stories during lockdown, please share, I’d love to understand how our community is overcoming the challenges of lockdown.