No agenda, no workshop. If you’re just spitballing ideas without a structure, you’re wasting clients and your time. The agenda is a timetable of exercises with the goal and inputs for each exercise clearly laid out. The agenda “forces” you to put your plan to paper and check whether you’ll be able to deliver what you promised to the client and our internal team by following it.

Sounds good, but how do you build one? You work your way backward – this should be your flow:

• Define workshop goals
• Define the exercises that will be your final deliverable – i.e., the ones you need to be able to achieve workshop goals
• Define exercises whose deliverables will be used as input for those final exercises. Let’s call those once-removed exercises
• Now repeat this for any twice- or thrice-removed exercises until you get to the beginning of your workshop

We have a huge repository of workshop exercises you can use to build your perfect agenda. → FigJam

Planning resources

Three types of resources you need to plan out in an agenda – participants, time and materials.

Let’s start with time. For each exercise, you need to define how long it will take. You can rely on previous agendas and ask your colleagues what’s their experience with a specific exercise. As a rule of thumb, these are things that extend the amount of time needed:

• Number of participants
• Complexity of topic
• Type of work expected from participants. No absolute numbers, but this is the rank of activities from the longest to shortest Ideation&sketching > discussion > voting and review

Timeboxing will help you be more productive and avoid discussions for discussion's sake. Participants, especially on the client side, need to understand that pushing past the timebox results in less time for some other important exercise.

The next thing you need to plan for is participants. Depending on the client, you might need to be frugal with their team’s time. In general, you have three types of participants from the client’s team.

• Decision-makers → make sure they’re in for the voting and decision-making (d’uh) sessions. They probably won’t have time to be present for the whole workshop, so plan around their schedule
• Subject matter experts → they can provide some niche knowledge no one else on the client team has. Involve them in activities where their inputs are essential, like “Ask the experts” or “Value-effort matrix”, but don’t press them to be present all the time
• Core product team → you want them in all sessions, they’re the ones who’ll be ideation, reviewing and documenting things together with our team. They’re usually product owners/managers, UX designers and lead devs.

And finally, if you’re running a live workshop, make sure you have all the materials like post-its ready. We have a box with workshopping materials in our Zagreb and London offices. Always plan to have more workshop materials than you need.

One thing that’s easy to miss: have clarity on the actual venue where you’ll be holding the workshop. Some things to check:

• How do you access that building and do you need to ping the front desk to let you in
• Is there a whiteboard or some other surface you can write and put sticky notes on (a glass wall can serve that purpose)
• How many chairs and tables do you have in the room
• Will you need to change rooms between workshop days and whether there’s somewhere you can store your workshop materials
• What are the facilities there (tap water, WC, nearby restaurants)

For remote workshops, things are a bit easier. Create a new FigJam file, and name it Client - Project name - Workshop. Add the workshop agenda to the board and add exercise templates to the board as well. And you’re all set to share it with the client.