Introductions to participants

Go round the table and ask everyone to introduce themselves, their role on the project and EITHER a random fact about them that no-one else knows OR how they feel right now Time needed: 10 minutes

Introducing the sprint

After introducing everyone, you should introduce the objectives of the sprint: why are you all meeting here, what are you trying to achieve? Give an overview of the agenda - what are the key sessions, what should participants be trying to achieve in each session, and how will that help us reach our goal? Explain the ideation diamond (shown below) and the idea that we start by diverging (thinking creatively and widely) and then slowly converging back towards 1 or 2 core ideas.

You should also read out these ‘ground rules’ at the beginning of the workshop too, to set out how we want to behave during the sprint.

• Respect the clock - we have a lot to get through, so let’s try to stay on time. This also means listen more, speak less: let everyone have an equal opportunity to say something.
• Respect the speaker - no side conversations, no idea is a bad idea, and ask positive questions to drive the conversation forward.
• Respect the group - the unit of delivery is the team. We’ll succeed by working together, and everyone doing their bit.
• Active note-taking is essential. We’ll open a google doc for written notes, and every session should start with a nominated scribe. For visual activities we’ll open a google drive folder to upload photos to: please give them a name (session number + what’s in the picture). Everyone gets a pen and paper at the beginning too - be visual if it helps you think through your ideas.
• You are not the user. When we’re asking for opinions and reviews, we’d ask that you consider the key user personas for the project. How are we giving them value? Why will they come to the site?
• When you do speak, think carefully about your tone. We’re at the very start of this process: no idea is ruled out yet. In order to help bring out all the possibilities and build on them, we ask you to adopt the attitude of “Yes and”. This is a trick from improvisation, where a team builds out an idea for a sketch through positive enhancement. If you feel yourself saying “no” or “but”, think about how you can rephrase your idea to be additive and drive the conversation forward.
• Also try not to use ‘killing sentences’ that immediately discard an idea. Things like “that has been done before” and “that’s not going to work” are not too useful; think about how it was done before or why it didn’t work before, and use that to make this idea better.

Time needed: 15 minutes

Information Download/ Lightning talks

We also usually start our sprints with a series of contextual presentations to give context about the project, the users and any lessons learned from previous work. In the past we’ve had talks on the following

• Client PM - project objectives, what’s the problem to solve
• Client - lessons from a previous phase of the project
• Client - explain the data/ content to be visualised
• Researcher or Client - who are the users?
• Tech lead - what are the opportunities we could use (e.g. VR)/ are there any constraints we should bear in mind?
• Designer/ clinet - what are the design references we may follow
• Client PM’s boss (the strategy person) - what impact are we trying to achieve?

Run Q&A at the end, once all the talks are heard, not between each one.

Time needed: 5 mins per talk + 5 mins Q&A per talk