Business needs alignment workshop
Why run a business alignment workshop?
This workshop is useful when you don't have time to do individual interviews. It can also be useful when there’s various opinions about what your agency does.
Use it to co-design visions and missions at the same time.
| Prep time | People | Run time |
| 3 hours | 10 or more | 2 hours |
Preparation |
Materials |
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Before starting the workshop, research the business areas. Have some idea of what you think the vision and mission of the agency could be. The workshop will vary depending on what you already know about the business. Invite all business areas involved in setting needs and goals. Send them an agenda of the meeting. They will need to bring what they think the vision, mission and goals of the agency are. |
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How to run the workshop
Start the workshop with introductions and an icebreaker.
If you have a clear idea of the vision, mission and goals of the agency, show participants and get joint agreement.
If you anticipate disagreement, get them to write up the vision on post-it notes. Group the post-its and get agreement. Do the same for the mission statements. You should co-design statements at the same time.
It might be easier to get into smaller groups if you need to brainstorm missions.
The goal of the workshop is to get agreed vision, mission and goals of your agency.
Props can help facilitate the workshop:
- Use a ‘car park’ board to stick post-its with topics of conversation that take your workshop off on tangents. Address these topics at the end of the workshop or follow up on them after.
- Use visuals like the pyramid diagram to get quick understanding — follow the rules for writing vision, missions and goals.
Follow up
This will vary depending on whether you could reach agreement in your workshop.
If you reach agreement, send an email to confirm. Keep the group of participants updated and inform your governance group.
If there’s no agreement, run more workshops to continue understanding business problems. It is critical to understand your business to create a content strategy.
Add your business need to your content strategy template.