Planning workshops are tough at the best of times. Getting people together in one spot to work out how to deliver the project. With the pandemic, teams shifted to remote work. People and organizations are slowly finding their way of juggling remote work with family life. Mixing planning workshops with remote working can be a recipe for disaster.
Recently, I facilitated a successful virtual planning workshop. Here are some tips on what made the workshop succeed and what improvements can be made. Hopefully, you find some useful nuggets that will help you get a great outcome for your team at your next remote planning workshop.
Structure and Planning
Planning and setting up a good structure for the workshops is critical for success. In an onsite workshop, you may be able to wing it by having a high-level structure and plan. Due to the nature of an online workshop, having a detailed plan is important and will help to make up for the remote setting and difficulties in engagement. It won’t totally cover the gap but will mitigate a lot of it.
It's easier for online workshops to run off the rails and harder for the facilitator to bring them back on track. Having a detailed plan on how each session will work gives you an improved chance of keeping things on track.
As with any workshop, planning is so important so make sure you have the basics down - a set of objectives, an agenda, ground rules and tools.
Goals and Outcomes
Identify the goals and outcomes that the project needs from the workshop. It will set the direction, pace and tone of the workshop. The team and stakeholders will get clarity when the goals and outcomes are articulated. Derive the agenda from the outcomes. Flesh them out and make sure they are linked back to the outcome. Keep it narrow and focused, it will improve the chance of success.
Detailed Plan
In a virtual workshop, it's even more important to plan how the workshop will run. Step through each agenda item in detail.
Identify the challenges that the participants may face and how you can help to overcome them, identify any risks and their mitigating actions. What tools do you need for the topic? How will the information be captured? Who do you need to actively take part in? How do you see the attendees take part? What are the outcomes and how do they feed into the next agenda item?
Get others to help with being the scribe during the workshops.
The length of time for the workshop is also important. It's a lot harder to focus online so make sure you allow for regular breaks and time away from the screen.
Ground Rules
Setting ground rules is another key activity as part of your planning. Make it clear what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Examples of the ground rules that we had for our planning workshop are:
- Everyone has a right to be heard
- Everyone has a right to speak
- Respect others opinions
Technology
There is a chance of technical issues causing problems in an online workshop, for example, wi-fi being flaky, webcams taking up too much bandwidth and your virtual tools not working when you need them to. Make sure you spend some time setting up and testing the tools you are using and have a backup available that you can switch to if needed.
Pre-work
The team spent weeks preceding the planning workshop making sure the pre-work was done and the stakeholders were engaged. The designs were drafted and walked through with the stakeholders. The Objectives and Key results and associated impact mapping were done. This helps to get stakeholders across the work and help with alignment. It also helps to keep the workshops focused.
This would apply for onsite workshops as well but is far more critical in virtual planning workshops. Make sure the artifacts and documents are available in the collaboration tool.
Tools & documentation
In a remote workshop, you have less space to design and collaborate. You would need to think about the type of space that you require and what tools are needed.
The tools you choose must be effective and you need to understand how people will use them during the workshop. Check those people know how to use the tools properly before the workshop.
Our organization uses Microsoft Teams, so we ended up getting a separate channel. We posted all documentation in the channel’s wiki so everyone could access it. We used the Planner tool to create a space to capture questions, parking lot items, actions, risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies.
We had another Planner tab to capture the draft plan.
In an onsite workshop, we had whiteboards that can be used for collaboration and brainstorming. In Teams, we didn’t have access to the whiteboard app instead we used Onenote as a whiteboard.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
I don’t think you can over-communicate in a virtual workshop. Prior to the workshop, make sure the agreed pre-work is done, if not then you’ll need to work out the implication of not having work done prior to the workshop and what it means for the plan.
Communicate to the stakeholders beforehand on the agenda, ground rules, information available, agenda and how to use the tools. Give them at least a day to review the information and make sure they have access to the Teams channel or whatever collaboration tool you are using.
At the start of the workshop, brief them on the agenda, ground rules and how to use the tools — again. Encourage them to actively participate by using the tools during the workshop.
Engagement and Alignment
Another challenge is getting everyone engaged and aligned. It's easy to hide behind the screen in an online workshop. And to miss things without realising them. Keeping participants focused during the remote sessions can be tough.
It is easier to get a feel of the room with an onsite workshop than with a virtual workshop. At an onsite workshop, you can see people’s expressions and body language. It's a lot harder with a virtual workshop.
We encouraged attendees to turn on their webcams as this will help the facilitators to see people’s expressions. We had a competition for the best virtual backgrounds and the winner gets a gift card.
During the workshop, keep track of who is participating and who isn’t. Encourage those who haven’t spoken to speak up, give them the floor. Pause regularly during the workshop to check on the Parking lot, questions, actions and RAID items. This gives everyone a chance to be aligned and may generate additional discussion points.
Finishing Up
Online workshops take a lot more energy and focus. Screen time makes you tired easily. Having a specific goal for the workshop helps to keep the focus and shorten the length of the workshop. It’s OK to have follow up sessions with a different set of objectives. It’s probably easier to get people to attend a number of short workshops than one long workshop or a multi-day workshop.
Have regular breaks during the workshop to give people a rest from the screen and consolidate the information.
When closing the workshop, make sure that you summarize what was discussed, who owns the actions or open questions and when they should be closed off, communicate the next steps and welcome any feedback on the workshop. Some facilitators run a quick retrospective on the workshop near the end. Some send a survey out after the workshop. It's up to you how you get feedback on the workshop. Follow up and next steps are key to successfully getting the outcome that you came in with.