Improve Discovery While Adapting to a Pandemic
You’re planning a discovery workshop where you will meet with stakeholders. You want to decide on the solution scope and make sure you cover all the customer needs within the scope. You reviewed customer documents pertaining to your company's proposed solution. You look forward to stakeholders answering your questions. You prepared an agenda outlining the workshop's scope, objectives and outcomes. Stakeholders will arrive from around the country for the workshop. You're excited to get everyone in the same place to align on what the customer needs. You want to cover all the needs in the workshop, so the customer receives the solution they expect, and more.
The coronavirus pandemic hits, causing businesses to cancel non-essential travel, including your stakeholders' trips. What do you do now? You have anticipated this workshop for months! As you come up with ideas to salvage the situation, you shift perspective. Instead of regretting a cancelled on-site meeting, you anticipate opportunities to improve the workshop. As a purposeful architect, you adjust to changes in plans as well as you adjust to inevitable changes in customer needs and solution design.
You quickly organize a virtual conference for the workshop. This allows you to connect and keep momentum. A virtual workshop provides more scheduling flexibility. When stakeholders come in from different places, you plan to have all-day meetings to make the most of everyone's presence at the workshop.
The virtual workshop enables you to schedule one-hour sessions spread over several days. You can fit these sessions into more participants' schedules. Each one hour session includes only people who need to participate, making the session more focused and conversational. The stakeholders who could not make the trip now have opportunities to participate.
The virtual workshop improves the stakeholder experience. Breaking down the meeting into focused sessions with only the necessary participants results in a better outcome. For example, when we developed ticketing management apps for Coca-Cola Global Hospitality, we wanted to meet in person, but the stakeholders worked in different locations around the world. Instead, we had weekly teleconferences with the Ticketing Manager in the U.K. and a manager at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta.
The weekly teleconferences enabled us to make quick adjustments when the needs changed, or we discovered better ways of designing the solution. Contrast this with having a two-day face to face discovery session, and returning home with a locked-in list of ticketing needs. I'm certain that having the ticketing needs refined weekly produced better solutions.
When plans change, adapt and look for opportunities to improve the outcome.
Additional Information
Bridging the Gap has an excellent article on How to Plan a Virtual Meeting