How to Run an Effective Live Workshop

Logistics, considerations, and ground rules for helping your clients through live process-mapping workshops

Editor’s note: This is the sixth and final post in a series of blog posts designed to help you help your clients drive more effective change, leading to better user adoption and more successful implementations. Please see posts one, two, three, four, and five for more insight into why change fails, how to pick the right change strategy for success, and how to communicate effectively to ensure change sticks.

In the sixth and final blog of this change management series, we’re going to give you the “gold dust” on how to run live process-mapping workshops. This is based on 20 years experience across 1000+ customers ranging from innovative startups to highly regulated Fortune 500 companies.

You may have seen one of our Elements.cloud team members at Dreamforce 2016, or a WorldTour or Dreamin’ event, where we run a live mapping workshop in 20 minutes with the audience that attends our session. We do it live using Elements.cloud with input from the audience. So, true improv! Here’s what we’ve learned:

Why use LIVE workshops?

Using live workshops to map out business processes is far more effective than completing questionnaires or conducting individual interviews. Whilst live workshops — either face-to-face or virtual — seem to be scary and higher risk, the benefits are huge. To name a few:

Don’t underestimate how much time this saves, or the value delivered for the time expended. It will take far less time than you think to become proficient at running live mapping workshops. To start with you may feel more comfortable with two facilitators; one to “work the room” and one to use the app to map the hierarchical processes.

Logistics of a great live workshop

Here are a few things to consider when setting up your live workshop:

How to optimize your approach

Here are some important things to focus on:

And a few final ground rules to keep in mind…

Good luck!


Ian is the CEO of Elements.cloud, an app that helps you clean-up, document and build your Org. Get a view or your Org you never seen before with a 14 day trial on AppExchange

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Ian Gotts @iangotts

Written by

Founder & CEO Elements.cloud (Documentation Hub for Salesforce): User Group co-Leader, customer & evangelist since 2002 : Author : Speaker

Inside the Salesforce Ecosystem

Brought to you by Salesforce AppExchange, learn customer and business success insights - straight from leaders in the Salesforce ecosystem.

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