Get buy in from your leaders

This is possibly one of the harder steps given the amount of time this will take up. Luckily, when I planned my Customer Workshop, I had an amazing organisation that fully supported putting customers in front of all staff especially staff that don't typically get to see them.

Your expected outcomes from the first section will be important here so make sure you refer to those. In the promotional files there's a deck you can use to support your case.

Esentially you will improve your customer's relationship with your company. If your company has lots of customers expect questions about scaling the Customer Workshop. It's true, this won't scale but the benefits to the team will last for months after the event.

I recon focusing on the effect this will have on your team is very important. I've seen it improve engagement massively across 5 different delivery teams. It has the effect of 4 back to back hackathons. It restores or reinforces self selection and self reliance in your teams. They have to figure out how to organise themselves to solve nine different problems in a fixed priority.

Due to the time constraints it's like running a startup weekend where the teams have to solve to a product, validate and iterate a couple of times in 4 days in order to fix your customer's problem. This turns your team in to entrepreneurs for a week. They will get to learn all aspects of creating a product.

Because of the pressure you'll quickly see where the team has dependencies on other resources in the company that slow them down. For example if the team needs to go to legal for approvals before putting out some marketing but that takes 2 weeks. You can evaluate these blockers and fix them after the event.

You will bring your teams together in ways they may not work day-to-day. For example your tech teams may not work daily with with the teams who sell to your customers. For this event i recommend bringing them together every day for the week or multiple times. Having the work together for the entire thing would be even better. They will form relationships and have a better understanding of each other's roles and responsibilities, including the difficulties faced in each role.

TASK: Your task now is to review the slide deck provided, prepare to speak about the points above, know your budget and have a copy off your schedule printed to hand out. Don't add any details to the slides. Just speak and sell with your passion.

Complete and Continue