Let MoSCoW help you with facilitation and workshop design ;-)

Interactivity vs. Schedule

When designing a workshop –or any session– you facilitate one crucial aspect is timing. But timing gets complicated when you have lots of interactive parts in the session in question. And we know from research about training and oftentimes also from personal experience, that interactive elements are essential to successful sessions, so there is a serious incentive to include interactive stuff. The same holds true for other kinds of meetings as well – from design sessions to board meetings.

Balancing being on time an interactivity with MoSCoW

There is an old idea, made popular in the early days of agile by its extensive use in DSDM called MoSCoW. The capital letters in MoSCoW stand for Must Should Could Won’t and the «o»s are just there to make it sound nice. Without looking into the original priotization method too deeply, thinking about the design of a session in therm of MoSCoW categories helps a lot in balancing timeliness and interactivity. Especially if you combine the MoSCoW thinking with the concept of Heijunka or work (load) leveling.

Designing the session

In most sessions, especially in teaching, it is not a good idea to have all the musts at the beginning – because of the way people learn a schedule should not be a backlog where you put all the important stuff up front and the rest at the end anyway. The approach that I have seen to be usefull to a lot of facilitators, is to make shure that your schedule consists of a well balanced mix of must, should and could elements. What ‘well balanced’ means depends on the circumstances of course. Assuming we’re in a training situation and we know only very little about your audience, we might want to include more ‘could’ elements than we do when we’re working in a well known setting. This is the Heijunka part – heijunka literally means ‘leveling’, but in the context of lean the meaning is extended to something like ‘smart leveling.’

BTW: In meetings that need to have decisions at the end, one of the must items –come to decisions– needs to be at the end. So it’s a very good idea to have discardable parts in the schedule even if the sessions you’re facilitating is not a training.

Applying triage as you go

Now while we run the session we don‘t want to constantly check the clock to see if we’re either too fast or too slow. Quite to the contrary. We do look at the time often, but we use our projected agenda (including the MoSCoW classifications) to adjust as we go. When we’re ahead of the time (e.g. because the audience is faster than expeted) we can transport a bit more information and include the could element that we put in our internal agenda. Should we be slower than planned we cut one of the should elements. By using this approach it is way easier to keep the value for the participants high for the whole session. (As opposed to lumping all the unimportant stuff at the end, so that we also could skip it – as we would do it in a prioritized backlog apporach.]

Just give it a try...

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg