Viima is a great tool for running brainstorming sessions and workshops, both in-person and virtual.
In this brief guide, we'll explain some of the key considerations to keep in mind with these Viima use cases.
Key benefits of using Viima for workshops
All information is automatically documented and stored for later and in a structured format. In traditional workshops, someone has to put in the work of documenting all of the information after the workshop. Scribbled down notes and some post-its often make this a tedious process and you risk losing some valuable insights in the process. Plus, because the data is already in a structured format, it's easy to keep working on these after the meeting.
Real-time updates make participation a breeze. New ideas, comments, and many other types of data update on your Viima board in real time. This has a couple of key benefits: everyone can type in their ideas and comments they'll be visible to everyone else immediately, even those that might be participating virtually.
Natural channel for follow-up. Often a key challenge in workshops is what happens after one: next steps and communication about those. Viima makes it easy for you to do both, and since everyone has access and all the data is already there, this is very natural.
Repeatable and scalable process to use across the organization. Viima's board templates allow you to first settle on a process and set everything up for a workshop in advance, but even more importantly, this allows you to seamlessly scale the process across the organization. By using a previous workshop as a template, you can set up another one in seconds. This is a natural way to also share and reinforce best practices and common processes for teams doing workshops across your organization.
Best Practices for using Viima in workshops:
Settle on the process first. This could mean multiple processes if there are different kinds of sessions being organized. But, as mentioned, this allows you to create one board with all the right settings, and then scale the approach. For example, you might want to run brainstorming sessions with a process such as the double diamond and set a pre-defined evaluation criterion for figuring out the best ideas to move forward.
Run the session. Physical, virtual, and hybrid models have all proven to work well. Choose whatever works best for your team.
Use the same Viima board for the next steps related to the session. At a minimum, this typically means communication about decisions that were made after the session. Using Viima makes this easier and more transparent since updates will be sent to everyone involved with the idea, and the decisions will later be available to everyone for increased transparency.
Consider running multiple workshops on the same board as part of the process. For example, many users choose to first have an ideation session, then work offline to refine the ideas to fully fledged concepts, and then have another session for evaluating the concepts and making decisions about the next steps.
Consider moving ideas to another board. Many ideas require more extensive work (typically related to implementation) after the workshop. If this is the case for you, you might want to copy (or move) the ideas to another board and/or a separate project management tool, such as JIRA, for further processing. If you do move the idea within Viima, the key information will automatically be there for those starting to work on the idea.
Use your boards as templates for future sessions with the “copy board settings” functionality. This way you can have a separate “clean sheet” for every session, but still have all of the right settings in place within a minute or two. These templates are very useful for empowering teams, communicating best practices, and also for reinforcing them across the organization.