Many people ask me on a daily basis how come up with all those helpful facilitation techniques and methods for workshops. I am going to tell you a secret… those are not my ideas! Even if creating a “new method”, it’s usually just a variation of some old method used in a different context.
So the question arises, if I am not the author of all those shiny methods, then from where I am taking them?
I will try to keep this post up to date as a reference for you and also for me about all great sources of facilitation methods that can be used in IT.
General Facilitation
- Liberating Structures – 33 microstructures from which you could build agenda for workshops on almost any topic. It also contains case studies which could be very helpful when you are trying to prepare your own agenda
- Gamestorming – its a website and aggregator of many very helpful methods, every method is described in a very precise way and assigned to a category like Problem Solving, Decision Making, Planning, etc.
- Gamestorming Book – if you think seriously about becoming a facilitator with your own set of tools, you should definitely read this book it gives you a toolbox with help of which you could start creating your own games
- https://www.sessionlab.com – website and an application in the same time, a great resource of many many techniques. I haven’t found anywhere else such a big list of Energisers and Ice-breaker’s ideas.
General Facilitation in IT
- Open Practice Library – a community-driven repository of practices and tools. The really good thing here is that all those methods are split into categories like Discovery and Delivery, which could be very helpful when we are looking for a method.
- https://www.romanpichler.com/romans-books/strategize/ – a good book about roadmap workshops
Architecture Workshops Facilitation
- Design it! – Great book on architecture in general, but the most interesting part is in Part 3 called Architect Toolbox in which the author shows us many facilitation techniques to run architecture workshops
Event Storming
- Introducing EventStorming – almost finished book by inventor of ES since last decade 😉
- https://github.com/mariuszgil/awesome-eventstorming – extremely good aggregation of materials and links about Event Storming done by Mariusz Gil
- https://github.com/wwerner/event-storming-cheatsheet – event storming cheatsheet for those who are lazy
Impact Mapping
- https://medium.com/@antonzotin/5-simple-steps-to-run-your-first-impact-mapping-session-7d182acbf153 – a short introduction
- https://www.impactmapping.org/ – short description and the book was written by the author of method: Gojko Adzic
Example Mapping
User Story Mapping
- https://agilevelocity.com/agile-tools/story-mapping-101/
- https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/story-mapping-visual-way-building-product-backlog
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/user-story-mapping/9781491904893/ – the bible of User Story Mapping, book written Jeff Patton and Peter Economy
Domain Storytelling
- http://www.domainstorytelling.org/ – website of authors of the method with really good introduction