As teams ramp up to do new projects, or attempt to solve new ideas, the CIO office encourages using Design Thinking methodology, to keep teams focused on end users, while developing their plans.

Challenges

In 2015, I ran or co-ran 5 multi-day design workshops, ranging from 6 people to 32 people. In 2016, I ran 3 more. Each group had different objectives and backgrounds, so my goal was to help educate people in design thinking, while facilitating their problem solving.

What I did

• For each workshop, I worked with the workshop sponsor (and the co-faciliator, where there was one) to help them articulate their goals and the end-user perspectives they were attempting to represent, and prepare a detailed agenda, with exercises designed around their requirements.
• During the workshop, I facilitated exercises, helped bring focus where there was confusion, kept teams on track, and helped teams develop a set of action items to use after the workshop -- feeding into their Agile backlog.
• After each workshop, I spent time with other facilitators, evaluating what worked and did not work, so that we could all improve our workshops moving forward.