EventStorming

Description

This is a fun collaborative event where domain experts, stakeholders, developers, and engineers work closely together on one collaboration board to map out the strategic architecture of the organization in order to tame chaos and uncover new opportunities for customer value chains.

EventStorming is deeply rooted in Domain-Driven Design and encourages exploring and designing systems in a way that makes them easily decoupled.

What can you expect from this service?

The workshop I facilitate remotely is a condensed version of EventStorming. Instead of attempting to capture the Big Picture, we focus on a specific scope. I will use other tools with the Event Board to help the sessions remained focused. I try to focus on facilitating four types of EventStorming workshops:

1. Assess lines of business. In this workshop, we use Wardley Mapping, the Business Model Canvas, and the Event Board to assess a specific line of business and determine if we can make improvements that will move the needle for a specific line of business.
2. Explore a startup business model. In this workshop we use Wardley Mapping, the Business Model Canvas, and the Event Board to explore building a startup.
3. Design new services. Similar to the start-up workshop, but we explore how to start new services and lines of business within an existing bounded context (area of business).
4. Design event-driven systems and software. This is much more focused on the design of platforms and tactical architecture. This is an ideal workshop to perform after my Tech Assessment workshop, if we need to flesh out additional elements of the tactical architecture.

After purchasing this service, I will send you an invitation to an initial 30-minute discussion to plan out the sessions. We will select one of the existing patterns and set times for workshop sessions.

This workshop has basically two long sessions.

It’s a good idea to have anyone on the call whose schedules could be impacted by the meetings. I suggest we schedule no more than two sessions per week, with a few days between sessions. One session a week is ideal.

The first session must be planned to occur within seven days of purchase. I do my best to accommodate emergencies and unforeseen obstacles, but it’s important that you and your team are ready and available to take on the time and effort involved to make the process a success. You and your team do most of the work in these sessions. I primarily guide, facilitate, and advise.

I only run two of these workshops at a time, so if you see that there are no quantities available for the workshop, please reach out to me via the general contact form, and I’ll let you know when the next available dates are.

Once the session dates are planned, I’ll send out a welcome packet and some materials to familiarize everyone with the process. It’s import to know if I need to accommodate any special needs for the sessions, as well.

The Process

EventStorming sessions are based on applying Domain-Driven Design concepts to workflows and business processes that involve causal relationships such as commands, policies, and events. We use the Event Board to map this behavior in a way that allows us to find gaps in thinking, missing elements from a plan, or to clarify group understanding related to how something works.

The Event Board is the centerpiece of this workshop, but we also use additional tools to help view different dimensions of the subject under discussion.

In most cases, we will begin with an overview of the goals and desired outcomes of the workshop. We will review any important values chains, such as customer or supplier. We will then create strategic design, when applicable, and move on to tactical solutioning.

I record each session and capture a transcript. I will follow up each session after a few days with an email summarizing the meeting and answering any questions that might have come up during the session that required further research.

One week after the final session, I will deliver our closing documents. These are the executive summary, the solution architecture document, and the iterative project plan with cost and delivery estimates (the estimates have a 60 day shelf-life), those documents are necessary for the goals of the workshop. In some cases, a much smaller collection of artifacts will be delivered. This is discussed in our first meeting.

I will deliver these documents to workshop attendees first, and then we will plan for a final presentation and review of the documents and plans. At this stage of the engagement, I would be more than happy to let you or one of your team members make the presentation to stakeholders. I will be available to answer any questions, but after all the effort that you and your team will put into this, it only makes sense that you present it to the organization.

When should I not use one of the EventStorming sessions?

It’s difficult to say when you should not use an EventStorming session, other than the specific workshops I’ve designed to achieve specific outcomes. The EventStorming is definitely a great place to start when you’re interested in assessing a system, starting a project, or just need to get a feel for how your organization works.