Extremely Useful Whiteboard Templates For Efficient Workshops — Part 1

Learn whiteboard templates for product management, design thinking, agile software development, change management and facilitation

Visual thinking becomes less of an exotic method mastered by a few and more of a widespread way of collaborating and communicating complex concepts. The method has shown great results in the technology field, especially in software development. And while there is plenty of courses where people are taught the easy and simple way to draw comprehensive and fun looking pictograms, the topic of finding the right visual structure to support a specific conversation or a workshop is still generally uncovered. There are many facilitation templates available but those are not good enough for dynamic meetings where solutions are born next to a whiteboard.

Such solutions are discussed close to whiteboards — this tool together with sticky notes and flip-charts is becoming an integral part of a working environment in modern companies. Funny enough, in general, these tools are often either unused or used to an unsatisfactory intent (at least based on my observation of how people work with these materials in their daily work).

With this series of articles, I am giving simple recipes to visualising common situations you find when solving technology related problems. Most of them were ‘wheel-invented’ by me when dealing with such situations and are a product of numerous adjustments and improvements based on successful (and many times not so) applications; some were inspired by the existing methods and techniques (such as Customer Journey Map, Value Stream Map and so on). I hope you find these valuable and share your templates to make this list even more comprehensive.

Part 1 covers the three templates:

1. Analysis of roles involvement in a work process.
2. Customer journey mapping.
3. The visual way for handling retrospectives.

Also check part 2, it is available now.

1 — Analysis of roles involvement in a work process

Hybrid visual model that combines involvement chart aligned with a work process.

When

Quite often complex production process might involve multiple parties. A good example is the development of software applications that support business in a large organisation. The common issue with such processes is an unclear definition of ownership and responsibilities. Successful professionals try to find deficiencies in points of handover and improve collaboration and feedback. The first step is to visualise the problem — gaps in the involvement of certain roles in critical phases in this particular example.

How

Suggested sequence for facilitating the dialog around involvement of various roles in a certain work process.

1. Start with defining the process in question.
2. Mark up the chart area labeling the axis of involvement to make it clear what are the extremes.
3. Agree what roles should be analysed in the context of the process.
4. Analyse each role by drawing the curve of involvement making sure there is a consensus about the interpretation of what happens in reality.
5. And finally, have an honest discussion with the group what are the issues that come from the gaps in roles involvement and what should be the next steps.

Practical hints

• Use different colours or line styles to differentiate between the curves that represent involvement of this or that party.
• When there are too many roles in the scope of the analysis, it is OK to break the curves into separate ‘swim lanes’. This will complicate visual analysis, however, as it will be more difficult to compare a curve to a curve.
• Visualise the gaps and capture comments of the group to make the problem visible.
• Define action items directly on the visualisation — it will be easier to track progress around the agreements if the action items appear on the snapshot of the visualisation (which is often inserted somewhere in a presentation).

Other uses

This template can be easily reused for smaller processes and smaller groups — for example when you analyse communication gaps between your teams and the rest of the organisation or with external parties/stakeholders.

2 — Customer journey map

An example of how customer journey map could be created using whiteboard and sticky notes.

When

Customer journey map is a tool that was introduced by the famous IDEO company associated with the term of design thinking and is today an integral part of service design. This method analyses customer’s journey on her quest from a need to a solution with regards to interactions and touch points with us as the services or product provider and in the context of her satisfaction, needs and motivation. I have used this tool to align stakeholders and end users of my software product with regards to the future of the product’s development and to help define clear criteria for prioritising new features. It is a very powerful tool and is very appropriate to support product visioning and what not.

How

One way of doing a customer journey map — schematic explanation.

1. Start with the need that the customer is pursuing.
2. Define the phases of the customer getting to the end result.
3. Identify touch points with your company.
4. Define the activities that your company is performing to help the customer on her journey.
5. Analyse the customer satisfaction curve.
6. Identify the immediate areas for improvements — where the curve has the lowest values. Discuss what is causing this, capture comments and observations.
7. Come up with the suggestions on what can be changed to improve the customer satisfaction. Capture action items.

Practical hints

• Use sticky notes for actions and touch points — this way it will be very easy to redefine sequences in case a step or two was missing or there was a mistake.
• Use stickies of different colours to make it easier to navigate visually through the map. This will be even more important when there way too many stickies.
• Use red colour to visualise issues with the current processes.
• You need a lot of space for this exercise! The bigger whiteboard you get, the better. Alternatively, you could use smaller sticky notes (like in the demo animation above) to avoid a messy map.

Other uses

The method can be used to analyse user experience throughout her end-to-end scenarios working with a software. Generally speaking, this can be any situation where it is important to empathise with a role your team or your organisation is expected to provide a service or a product.

3 — The visual way of handling retrospectives

Visual way of capturing a retrospective workshop on a whiteboard with personal contributions written down on sticky notes.

When

If you are knowledgeable about agile software development then you surely heard about the term ‘retrospective’. For those who are not, it is a technique to ensure the team is engaged into a continuous process of improving their way of developing software, in other words, staying alert about what can be improved and what should be kept when it comes to doing their work. It is easy to see that this technique is valuable outside of just software development — it is just smart to think about how you do your work and strive to do it better, all the time. Therefore this template may be used not only by software development teams practicing SCRUM for example but by other office workers that want to reflect on their team collaboration.

How

The animated explanation of how you use the template for a retrospective workshop.

1. Start by drawing the horizontal time axis. Take up the entire size of the available whiteboard (especially if you retrospect over a long period of time).
2. Add the vertical axis with two symmetrical extremes —the happy smiley on top and the sad smiley in the bottom.
3. Agree with the group about the time span — how far back into the past you are looking (SCRUM teams usually retrospect 1 iteration back — 1–2 weeks; sometimes teams do extended retrospectives when they look back as far as 6 months, and so on). Clearly define the unit of time. For example, if you are looking back 6 months, then break the timeline into 6 even sections of time on your time axis.
4. Add ‘Now’ line so that the participants of the workshop could relate to the timeline.
5. Give participants time to write down their thoughts and feelings about what they would like to share with others and what happened during the period. Once the group is ready, ask people to go out to the whiteboard and place their sticky notes on the whiteboard in relation to two things — when the event happened and how the person felt about it.
6. Once everyone has placed their sticky notes on the timeline, facilitate the discussion around obvious patterns. During the discussion add (or ask participants to do so) labels to the events so it is easy to related clusters to important milestones that happened in the period. For example, a lot of people on the team might have had a bad experience during the release where they had to work overtime.
7. Discuss what can be taken out of the discussion and map your action items to the observed clusters.

Practical hints

• Make sure participants feel free to add notes to the drawing if they feel doing so. They need to perceive the template as a platform for them to express their experience. Make sure markers are available and encourage them to actively contribute.
• For long-range retrospective you might need a lot of space. Make sure you have enough white space. Sometimes you have to put a few flip-chart sheets on a long wall to create enough space if the whiteboard is not available or it is too small in size.
• You might want to use different colours of sticky notes to represent an individual. Might not be practical if the group is quite big (usually you can get four different colours of sticky notes by default).
• You can use different marker colours to discuss problematic events that require improvements (use red colour for that) and positive events that people liked (you could use green for that).

Other uses

This method can be used outside of working groups. You could do that with your client to discuss how your project went. Or you could invite your product stakeholders to go over the past release to reveal areas for improvement in your collaboration. Remember, it is a great way to constructively discuss ‘sensitive’ topics and to show various perspectives as seen by individuals involved in the events. The technique has a huge trust building potential, so go ahead and use it!

What templates do you use? Did you find the three templates described here useful? Share in comments!

There are more templates I would like to share and if you liked this article, follow me to get notified when next portion of templates is going to be released.

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About the author

Yuri Malishenko is an active practitioner, an author and a trainer on the topic of visual thinking and visual facilitation. He works as an agile coach for the Danish company and uses visual skills every day to co-create better software products and to become a better person. Check out his recent practical guideline on mastering basic skills of visualisation. If you like this type of content, follow Yuri on twitter @YuraMalishenko and facebook.