Designing and facilitating engaging group activities that achieve high impact outcomes
Our facilitation services start with understanding outcomes, then creating a design that fosters innovation and collaboration among participants. Our facilitators then guide groups towards achieving their product, process and strategic goals.
Agile inception and release planning
Complex planning workshops are a key ceremony for organizations adopting Agile practices at product and program levels. Using an outcome-driven approach, these facilitated workshops use Agile practices and principles in their design to effectively plan out product releases or increments.
For product delivery teams that need to create, map and plan product backlogs, the Agile Inception and Release Planning workshops are focused on bringing teams together, aligning on their product backlogs and release plans. With User Story Maps as the core pattern, these high impact workshops can flex from single to multiple teams.
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Inception workshop
Team inception workshops are a key ceremony for organizations adopting Agile practices at product and program levels. Using an outcome-driven approach, these workshops bring the whole team together to effectively plan out a product increment:
- Validate the product vision, roadmap and target outcomes
- Collaboratively create a comprehensive product backlog through user story mapping
- Prioritize the backlog and slice into releases
- Clarify team structures and roles
- Plan Agile governance and key ceremonies
- Identify impediments and mitigate risks
Release planning workshop
Release planning workshops are designed to identify and map the cross-functional activities needed to support releases, including:
- Code and artifact management
- Testing, integration, and deployment
- Product documentation, user training, and release communications
- Operations and support processes
Product discovery
Facilitated Agile product discovery workshops are deep dive sessions with product owners, users, analysts and other key interested parties to discover the product vision, problem statement, key success metrics, and high-level scope for a product or service.
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Using a range of techniques including elevator pitches, product canvas, stakeholder maps, user personas and scenarios, and service and workflow journeys, participants in the workshop will generate new ideas and approaches to understand and align to the problem statement. Typical artifacts from a product discovery workshop are:
- Problem statement
- User personas and key workflows
- Stakeholder map
- Definition of success
- Benchmarks of measurable objectives
Portfolio planning
Portfolio planning is a collaborative and structured approach that brings teams together to plan and align their work for a specific period, typically a quarter.
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The workshop is designed to foster collective ownership, break down silos, and ensure all teams are on the same page about priorities, dependencies, and delivery commitments.
The core participants in portfolio planning typically include portfolio leaders, product owners, scrum masters, technical leads, and business stakeholders. The benefits of synchronized planning include:
- Alignment around value, goals, challenges, and trade-offs
- Accelerated decision-making and problem-solving
- Improved cross-team coordination, collaboration, and communication
- Early identification of risks and dependencies
Strategic planning workshop or event
Strategic planning sessions are facilitated to gain alignment and a shared understanding, and identify the overarching vision, problem statements, key success metrics, and high-level scope and priorities for program areas.
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Typically ranging from 1 to 2 days with group sizes from 12 to 100, these sessions include attendees that are relevant to the direction of the program area and include sponsors, leadership roles, key team members, and other pertinent interest holders. Alluvial’s facilitators design the sessions in close collaboration with the sponsors to align on the organization’s vision, mission and goals. A key element of any design is ensuring all participants are able to engage and see themselves in the vision.
Using team building activities, story mapping, breakouts, visuals and a wide range of tools and techniques, the facilitators will guide discussions and activities towards the stated outcomes. Underpinning these workshops is a highly visual style that is both engaging and interactive that leads to strong participation in the activities and improved quality of outputs. After the workshop or event is complete, the facilitators will harvest all the materials, lessons learned and artifacts so that they can be quickly integrated into ongoing work.
Guiding Agile change workshop
These dynamic workshops are key inflection points for organizations progressing on their Agile journey. A Guiding Agile Change workshop focuses on collaboratively crafting meaningful outcomes and then mapping out a change backlog, ultimately leading to a sustainable Agile change platform.
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The highly visual workshops allow participants to explore and collaborate around the many paths towards organizational agility. Creative solutions emerge through rich discussions as participants from different departments or programs talk through shared outcomes. Understanding where initiatives may be aligned or at-odds with each other is key to developing coherence to the change effort. Additionally, getting a sense and limiting the amount of change-in-progress to avoid overwhelming the organization is crucial.