8 Sprints at Once

Sami Packard
Nov 4 · 7 min read

My team and I recently oversaw the facilitation of eight simultaneous design sprints for 70 top leaders from throughout our organization. The purpose of the event was to both tackle strategic challenges for the organization as well as equip leaders with new problem-solving skills as part of a broader executive leadership program. This was a huge undertaking and luckily, thanks to a small but mighty dream team- it went great! (i.e Jen Burciaga and Michelle Siciliano).

Below are the main questions we asked ourselves in putting this all together, how we went about answering them and what we learned along the way. A big thanks to AJ&Smart for the in-person training they provided us last year and all the learning materials they shared with us that we adapted for this event.

Here’s a little glimpse at what our Sprint Week looked like:

KEY QUESTIONS WE ASKED OURSELVES:

  1. How do we get facilitators for each team without a consultant budget?
  2. I’m training the trainers, but only have one day. How do I maximize this time?
  3. We have 3 days not 4 or 5, what do we condense or take out?
  4. How might we improve people’s abilities to find good lightning demos?
  5. How do we highlight how this way of working is different from people’s everyday work approach?

See below for our responses.

1. How do we get facilitators for each team without a consultant budget?

One day facilitator training

Originally, we thought about hiring outside consultants to facilitate the Sprints, but considering we needed a total of 16 facilitators, this was just simply outside of our budget. At the same time, our organization has been building up capacity for those facilitating Human Centered Design. So we thought to ourselves, why not just train our HCD experts in Design Sprints? So that’s what we did.

We trained internal talent, which was great because it met our Sprint week needs and expanded our organizational capacity around design sprints.. Key parts of recruiting this talent:

· Recruit internal employees EARLY. One week of time is a big ask. We recruited facilitators about 5 months in advance.

· Set expectations for time commitment. We communicated the time commitment ahead of time for both the week itself and the training/prep needed before hand. This made it easier for employees to check with their managers and get the approvals needed.

· Frame the WIIFM. Lots of folks had expressed interest in wanting to learn how to run Design Sprints from our team. Therefore, we made sure to emphasize this opportunity as well as the opportunity to network with each other and the leaders who would be participating in the Sprints.

2. I’m training the trainers, but only have one day. How do I maximize this time?

Training our facilitators was the key part of our job to make this event successful so we took it very seriously. Here’s what we did during our one-day training:

· Used Jake’s Laundry Service AS the sample project. Building off of what AJ&Smart provided to us from their Masterclass, we adapted the slides to focus just on this simple service so that we could focus the training on the methods and not the content. It greatly simplified the training. Because we only had one day and we wanted to cover all steps, we pre-baked several milestones along the way focusing more on the sprint activities that were new or different from our human-centered design trainings.

Follow-Up Materials Included:

· Detailed Speaker Notes: My colleague and I wrote EVERYTHING out. The context for each new activity, how long to talk and how long to leave for the activity and a few facilitator tips along the way. This helped ensure that all teams had a consistent experience and the facilitators really appreciated the detail. Facilitators printed these notes out and had them in a binder as a reference during the actual Sprint Week.

· Day to Day logistics- we printed out instructions for how to set-up the room everyday including activity headers to tape up to the wall to guide activities for that day. In retrospect, it would have been better to put these logistics in the first slide for each day, so that facilitators wouldn’t have to bounce back between slides and print-outs, but we didn’t have the logistics written out when we created the speaker notes.

· Pre-packed supplies- each team had a bin of supplies that were marked for each day. We wanted to reduce the cognitive load for facilitators as much as possible. See Day to Day Supply List here.

Each bin included all supplies for one sprint team

3. We have 3 days not 4 or 5, what do we condense or take out?

Below is a breakdown of how each day was spent and a little rationale on why we focused our efforts where we did. It’s worth noting that our days were from 9-5, not 10-4 so that actually gave us the same amount of hours as a typical four day Sprint.

· Day 1: Mapping, Two SME interviews, Two user interviews, HMWs, Long Term Goal, Sprint Questions, Targeting, Lightning Demo Research

o This was the first-time team participants were coming together for this topic so we didn’t want to cut corners on any alignment regarding where to focus.

o We also wanted to make sure we brought in users early to establish a foundation of empathy.

· Day 2: Lightning Demos, Walk the Wall, Brainstorm, Storyboard AND Prototype

o This is where we condensed the most. It was fast paced, but surprisingly it worked. Some teams had to work through lunch to get their storyboards done in time.

o We also had prototyping templates for teams to use for web or app solutions. Non-designers were able to build prototypes in power point easily.

· Day 3: Four rounds of member testing and quick session for iteration.

o We swapped out one testing session to allow teams time to iterate on their prototype since this was a key learning we wanted to convey.

· Day 4/5: Our last days were not formally part of the Sprint process, but rather focused on wrapping things up for the broader program we were a part of.

4. How might we improve people’s abilities to find good lightning demos?

We refer to the lightning demos as “analogous inspiration research,” and it’s something I’ve struggled with doing effectively in past Sprints. In the past, participants come up with somewhat generic lightning demos and then don’t connect these demos to their actual ideation so their thinking doesn’t go as far as I would like. So here’s what we did:

· Turn the Sprint Questions into Lightning Demo Prompts- considering how important Sprint Questions are and the desire for the ideas developed to overcome them, we ended up having facilitators turn their Sprint Questions into prompts for participants to then research. This enabled teams to find inspiration from organizations that had addressed the very barriers or challenges they were facing with their project. Below is a screenshot with examples from Jake’s Laundry Service. This ended up working really well and helped guide the concept sketch and prototype. (we refer to Sprint Questions as “Can We’s)

· Rotate through Demos as brainstorming prompts- For brainstorming, we decided not to do Crazy Eights as we haven’t found those to be super helpful thus far. Instead, we did a guided brainstorm to push people’s thinking. Instead of using generic brainstorming prompts such as “how would google solve this problem?” or “what would Oprah do?” we had participants choose their top 3 favorite lightning demos individually. They wrote these top three down on post-it notes so it was clear what they were being inspired by. Then, for two minutes each, they individually brainstormed new solutions based on inspiration #1, then #2, then #3. Each two-minute segment was focused on just one point of inspiration to help focus and push their thinking.

o One lesson we had to fix in real time was that some teams chose Sprint Questions that were very operationally focused and not end user focused. Meaning they were asking about budget, resourcing, etc, which would only lead to operational solutions not user-focused solutions. Luckily, this was caught early, and our designated facilitator coach was able to course correct them.

5. How do we highlight how this way of working is different from people’s everyday work approach?

Slides that highlight how Sprints get people to Work Together Differently

My boss, Tim Kieschnick, made these wonderful slides that describe status quo practices and how Design Sprints are different, along with their rationale. We incorporated these throughout the week directly following related activities, which gave a safe space for executives to pause and reflect on what felt different for them. We would have loved to have even more time for reflection, but we had more formal reflection time on Day 4 after the Sprint was completed.

· See Working Together Differently Slides here

Logistically- the event took place in a hotel where all the participants could reside, and we booked various meeting and dining rooms so that each team could have their own designated space. We got there a day early to set everything up and make things look as “Sprinty” and non-board room style as possible. We preferred this over a hackathon style event in one room, which makes things harder to focus and really absorb information.

But that’s about it. It was such a fun time to both design and execute this event, likely the highlight of my time at Kaiser Permanente. Feel free to ask other questions if you have any.

*All opinions expressed are my own and do not represent Kaiser Permanente.

Sami Packard

Written by

Experience Designer. Facilitator. Mother. www.samipackard.com for professional work.

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