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:
- They build consensus in the group and rapidly drive out improvement ideas. Some of these ideas are quick wins that don’t even need Salesforce changes
- You are developing the process content in the workshop, so no need to try and interpret notes or photos of whiteboards when you get back to your desk to build the process diagrams.
- It is easier to get agreement and sign-off when the participants see it being developed and they have had input as it is being created.
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:
- The optimum duration for each process mapping session should be no more than 3–4 hours. People start losing interest after that.
- Keep participants to between 8–10 people (Process Owner, Key Stakeholders, SMEs). They need to understand that they will be required to participate NOT observe.
- It is strongly recommended that the facilitator should be different from the process mapper. Especially in large workshops, the mapper will be too busy capturing to facilitate properly, or a very senior and political group. Clearly, the exception is where you are driving a group remotely. In either case, ensure the person doing the mapping is reasonably quick with a keyboard and mouse, and familiar with your online mapping tool.
- It is useful if the facilitator is not an expert in the field being discussed. This allows them to ask the ‘obvious’ questions, point out glaring inconsistencies, and prevents them from steering the group towards the facilitator’s personal preferences.
- With remote sessions, ensure people are on the same diagram in Elements.cloud and understand how to add comments to contribute remotely. Doing this direct in the Elements.cloud means all threads are maintained in the context of the diagram, instead of lost at the end of the web session or detached in an unrelated chatter stream.
- Get people involved. If you are remote, encourage interruption and comments, use sticky notes to capture people’s input. You can always stack them up for resolution later or move them out of the currently visible area.
- If you’re in the same location, don’t be afraid to use white boards and Post-It notes, But make sure you capture them all at the end of the session
How to optimize your approach
Here are some important things to focus on:
- Encourage conversation. The important thing is get interaction and momentum. Get them talking/arguing. It may start slowly, but it is worth investing the time to build consensus.
- Explain the how. Before you do anything, explain how you are going to capture the process (i.e. use the ‘when, what, why, and how’ diagram). Show them an example of a completed map with activity boxes, resources, attachments and drill-downs.
- Be clear about outcomes. Spend time to be clear on the outcomes that the end to end process covered by this workshop is looking to deliver. As a best practice, use sticky notes to display these key outcomes on screen so you can move them around. If you’re all in the same room, a whiteboard is also great.
- Set the scope of the workshop by looking at the first input and last output. It may take a surprisingly long time to get agreement on this. You cannot move forward until this is agreed upon.
- Map the “assume it works” flow. Do not get bogged down into all the exceptions and variations until you have mapped the “assume it works” route (what happens most often) end-to-end.
- Check regularly with the participants that the mapped information is an accurate representation of what was discussed. If they can’t agree, move to a whiteboard to sketch a flow of processes, then go back and map.
- Map using on line business app tool. Do not opt out and just use a whiteboard for the mapping. This is okay for higher level objectives and notes, but these should all end up in the map in appropriate places and contexts anyway.
And a few final ground rules to keep in mind…
- Park unresolved issues after five minutes of discussion — and remember that silence equals agreement.
- Map out processes one level at a time starting at the highest level THEN drill down into more and more details (i.e., Inputs, Activities, Outputs, Resources).Wherever possible, outputs should not be the past tense of the Activity, but should add value to the process description.
- Keep diagrams readable (8–10 activity boxes per diagram). One conversation at a time.
- All participants are equal and everyone’s input is welcome. Remind managers not to dominate the discussion — let the people who actually do the work have their say.
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

