Communication Workshops

Over the past few years, I have enjoyed conducting customer workshops. I have conducted Discovery workshops, Customer Journey workshops, and dedicated ones focused on finding, prioritizing, and solving team collaboration issues, which I will write more about below.

The workshop, which we later called the communication workshop, was my initiative when I worked at ITRun Consulting. The initiative came from needing to take UX to the next level. To do that, I had to create the space for it in the team. The team had to cooperate better and want to work better. There had to be time and understanding for this.

But how did we achieve it?

I observed that there are plenty of things we, as a team, could do way better, but good problem solvers know that their point of view is not enough. I decided first to align the team and check what others think and see.

I proposed a workshop method to align the team, which was accepted.

Observations

Challenges

4 main questions that drove the whole workshop

1. What is essential and most important to you at work?

2. What is it that hinders you at work and frustrates you?

3. What makes your job easier? When do you do your best?

4. Are there any problems within the team? If so, what is it?

Workshop structure

1. We started with the above questions.

2. Then we gathered all answers in 10 categories like "Poor communication" and "Not enough time per project."

3. Voting - każdy miał 6 głosów do oddania

4. HMW - zamieniliśmy problemy w pytania

Implementation

To decide and start implementing all the solutions that we wrote down, I proposed to use:

1. Pick the person responsible for a solution

2. Pick a person to help

3. ICE table

4. Reason to apply the solution

5. Action Plan / Change Proposal

6. Success criteria

Evaluation and summary

I took more than a few lessons about improvement in this project, but I enjoyed it more than any other, as I could see my ideas at work. The most important lessons for me are:

• Small steps at a time

• The change should come from both the top and the bottom

• Change needs time. If people don't have time to do their job correctly, they don't have time to implement change, even if it saves time.

• Implementation is more complex than it looks

• Implementation is more complicated than it looks

• Name of the project matters

In the end, only 11 out of 70+ solutions were implemented because our team got divided into other teams, a new manager came in, and the department director didn't want devs to spend time on some "communication" as they should spend their time only writing code.

Change is never done.

• Before we parted ways with ITRun Consulting, I've done a few more things:

• Developer's card. It's a checklist based on Nielsen's Heuristics and Gestalt principles.

• I've created a wiki page and group on Teams to share interesting stuff about UX, and it's an improvement for everyone interested.

• I found more sole UX Designers in the bank, and we co-created a wiki and exchanged experiences.