A Workshop is an amazing opportunity to bring together and collaborate with a number of different people involved with or affected by your work.
If they're planned well, they can be incredibly valuable for everyone involved. Workshops are great for brainstorming, interactive learning, building relationships, and problem solving.
They might include the people you’re trying to reach, the partners you’re working with, experts brought in from similar fields, or any combination of these (and other) groups who would benefit from talking to each other.
A Workshop is a great medium to both collect and share different experiences, as well as co-create potential solutions. This can either be working from an existing base or from a complete blank sheet.
Getting everyone involved is key to a successful workshop. If you stand up and talk for four hours, you're just giving a lecture – not facilitating a workshop.
Everyone needs to participate.
Workshops can provide invaluable insights into perspectives on issues. They offer a setting where this knowledge is shared as soon as it’s gathered.
Our team at Squid Digital and indeed our clients are eager to hit the ground running, but beginning with an exploratory or discovery workshop is something that we have affirmed time and again is time and money well spent.
While you might save time skipping this workshop session and the associated budget spent on it, you'll always end up paying for this omission one way or another. Either when you've built the wrong thing, the feature doesn't work for the user, or worse.
Doing rework when this occurs always ends up having financial and timeline implications for the project. The benefit of spending time and money upfront in a discovery workshop far outweighs the delays and budget impacts that will be felt when something has been missed.
There's no doubt that planning a great workshop is a lot of work. But if you spend time thinking through the details, everyone will get full value from the Workshop event........you may even enjoy it :-)