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Big Picture workshop with EventStorming @ Uniplaces
Last Thursday I went to Uniplaces to facilitate a Big Picture workshop with EventStorming.
What is EventStorming and a Big Picture workshop?
EventStorming is a workshop format for quickly exploring complex business domains. — Alberto Brandolini
EventStorming has many variants and the Big Picture is one of them. The goal of a Big Picture workshop is to assess the knowledge of the business domain across multiple teams in the company to break the knowledge silos.
Running the workshop
Room Setup
The most important thing in this kind of workshop is to have a good room setup. For that to happen some key fundamentals have to be in place:
- Unlimited modelling surface
- No chairs
- Enough space for people to walk around and have conversations
- Flip-chart to be used as a legend
- Plenty of sticky notes and markers
Brief introduction and setting the workshop goals
The workshop started with me giving a brief introduction, by explaining the goals and the dynamics of the workshop. After that I introduced the first sticky note colour, the orange. The orange sticky note represents the business relevant domain events. The events are written in the past tense form and added in a chronological order in the modelling surface — and it’s basically this.
The chaos
After a couple of minutes several orange sticky notes were already in the wall. There was a lot of chaos with people writing, pasting and moving around sticky notes. At this point, some conversations started, and one important action is to make sure that those conversations are recorded by adding sticky notes.
Organically introducing new sticky note colours
Introducing all colours at once simply doesn’t work — it’s a lot of information for people to process and would only make participants confused. So usually, from the workshops I’ve done as a participant, new sticky note colours are introduced when an opportunity arises. This way the participants understand better the goal of that colour.
Clean-up after the Chaos
After 45 minutes the orange sticky notes covered almost the entire wall. It was time to review them, remove duplicates, rewrite some, and move them back and forward to make the flow timeline more accurate.
The floor started to get some wrapped sticky notes (a good metric to see if the workshop was successful). While reviewing the sticky notes I noticed that there were mainly two personas in Uniplaces’ business flows. So I suggested having two swim-lanes, one per each persona — this way we would gain some space to be able to map both flows without running out of modelling surface.
While adding the two swim-lanes a big discussion popped up: what are we going to call the first and the second swim-lanes? Guest/Student? Accommodation Provider/Landlord?
This is one of the most important things of an EventStorming workshop — getting all departments to speak the same language, the called Ubiquitous Language. With these discussions agreements have to be made, and with them internal communication will improve.
After having the swim-lanes done, I asked participants to move stickies up or down depending on which persona they belonged to, and if there was a case it belongs to both then to duplicate the sticky note.
Narrative of the flows
After placing the stickies in the right swim-lanes, we did a narrative of the flows — reading the events from left to right — to make sure the timeline made sense and that we didn’t miss any events.
Wrap Up
It was a successful workshop. The team was engaged, the conversations were valuable, and by the end we had a shared understanding of the domain that wasn’t there before. The real outcome wasn’t the wall of sticky notes — it was the conversations that happened around them.