Event storming is a technique that is used to cross the boundaries between multiple departments within an organisation and bring people from various disciplines together to define and map out the things they do that add value to their customer.
This technique’s sole objective is to bring people from business, UX, development, marketing and other departments together to understand what everyone is doing on a day-to-day basis.
Set the scene
Before you begin, you will need to ensure the following steps are implemented:
- Decide on a workshop agenda – Identity a few key problems or business proccesses that need solving or improvement.
- Invite all the necessary stakeholders – It is essential to identify stakeholders from every area in the business that are involved as well as ensure that people working at different levels are involved. It is not beneficial to host this just as an executive workshop or just as the IT department because you will not get the full picture.
- Get supplies – you need to cater for some stationery if the workship will be in person, or use an online virtual whiteboard application.
Round 1: Create an event timeline
We will use blue stickies to represent domain events. You will create sequential steps within your department groups and add them to the timeline. Domain events are anything and everything you do to add value to the customer. It is not just executing steps on a software application. Every phone call, email or task happening outside of the system is also a domain event.
Round 2: Pain Points
We will use purple stickies to add pain points or potential enhancements to areas in the process. Anyone can add pain points anywhere on the canvas. You will start to see where issues occur in the hand over points between departments and what people are struggling with in their own departments. It will also require all participants to review all the other departments and start asking questions.
Round 3: Finding focus areas
We use arrow voting to pick the areas where we need to focus first. This will highlight the biggest blockers in the process and where most of the effort should be going in to. A workshop like this can take between 3-4 hours depending on the size of the audience and complexity of the problem. The common understanding it creates is definitely worth the time spent on this.
Outcomes
The outcome of the workshops should be to have the whole process visible and really see the big picture. There will be massive learnings for the workshop attendees as they get insight into other departments and really cross the silo boundaries in the organisation. Lastly, there should be alignment around core issues identified through arrow voting.
Discover the next steps through our guide
Interested in what the next steps are after Event Storming? You can dive deeper into the problem space with our free e-book “Exploring the problem space: a guide to building the right solutions” available through the link below.