Workshop Toolkit
Internal Initiative
Project Overview
At my current company, Nagarro, we are like a tech agency that serves many global brands. As a design team, we frequently conduct workshops, research methods, and exercises. As our design team grew, it became challenging to teach our successful methods. To address this issue, we decided to document them so that they could be easily replicated. Since I had a lot of experience with workshops and research methods, I was a main contributor to this effort.
Responsabilities
Acting as Individual Contributor and then Initiative Coordinator
- Collaborate on which methods to create or refine research methods.
- Support team members for peer reviews and feedback sessions.
- Facilitate roadmap and goal-planning sessions.
- Build and test templates in Miro.
- Delegate responsibilities, keep contributors accountable, and jump in when help is needed.
- Help facilitate and participate in dry-run sessions.
- Contribute to overall documentation and analysis for clarity and consistency throughout the toolkit.
- Market and encourage design team to use the tool and templates.
Problems
- At the start of new projects, time was wasted on redoing methods and setup.
- Designers were not implementing things consistently, creating inconsistencies with our mission and philosophies.
- Our current templates were difficult to use, lacking sufficient detail or guidance to meet the needs of our clients.
Timeline
Between 5 designer contributors with our spare time between client work.
- Roadmap Planning / 1 month
- Method Collection / 2 months
- Content Planning / 2 months
- Revising Content / 3 month
- Dry Runs / 2 months
Results & Outcomes
Methods Collected
Methods Completed for Phase 1
Methods Completed for Phase 2
Dry Runs
The Design Process
Everything we do as a design and product team, we follow our process wheel. Within our Workshop toolkit we’ve categorized our workshops within the wheel structure.
- Discover
- Define
- Create
- Validate
- Implement
- Scale
All together these phases give us success for our clients and their customers.
Roadmap Planning
I can’t take credit for starting the entire initiative, but I empowered each contributor to do what they felt was necessary. When we initially disagreed on a direction, we took a group vote and then moved forward.
Our initiative began in January 2022. First, we established our mission and discussed our objectives and key results (OKRs) for the year. We then created tasks to support these OKRs and worked on them whenever we had the bandwidth between client work.
Method Curation
We bought a professional Notion kit that already contained most of the workshops and UX methods we wanted, which was a good starting point. Based on our experience, we’ve modified them to the extent that it’s no longer recognizable from the original.
We’ve compiled around 28 methods and, for the first phase release to the team, we’ve released 8 workshops that are fully fleshed out with instructions, an agenda, and Miro templates.
Method Completion
I was primarily responsible for content flow and writing in all the pieces. I have extensive experience in writing college curricula, course objectives, and lesson plans.
One approach that is often overlooked is to write documentation or walkthroughs that cater to all levels of experience in the UX field. This allows interns, project managers, or developers to understand the material and implement it with confidence.
For the 8 workshops we would publish, we structured content as follows:
- Overview
- Preparation
- Agenda
- Method steps
- Findings / Reporting
Results & Outcomes
In the past year, we accomplished a lot during the first phase of launching the Workshop Toolkit to the team. Our final steps for 2022 were to practice dry-runs of the workshops and include the recordings within the first 8 workshops we released.
Our Design team is now fully equipped with our most popular workshops, which they can incorporate into their process with little to no setup time.