How to manage time efficiently during your event storming?

Become a master of time: set a sustainable pace, adapt your agenda on the go, and leverage breaks and the participant’s agenda constraints.

Any Event Storming workshop starts with the promise that you will have figured out the most essential issues in two days. As a facilitator, you do not want to be only half-through after two days or to finish in one day without tackling the important stuff!

Good time management can easily avoid these traps. The critical challenge is finding the proper rhythm: a sustainable pace that accommodates everyone’s agenda yet lets you finish without running.

Here are time management tips that will help you find the right pace:

• Manage your breaks with the Pomodoro
• Use the breaks to adapt your facilitation
• Twice 2 hours per day is sustainable
• Use regular ROTIs to adapt the agenda
• Re-narrate to help new joiners (and others) catch up
• Optimize the time of Domain and UX experts

Manage your breaks with the Pomodoro

A double Pomodoro is the most productive and sustainable schedule for Event Storming. If you are unfamiliar with the Pomodoro technique, the Wikipedia page is a short crash course. Here is a summary of the double Pomodoro:

• Workshop for 50 minutes
• Break for 5 minutes
• Repeat twice and take an extended 15-minute break

Characteristic	Classic Pomodoro	Double Pomodoro
Length	25 minutes	50 minutes
Short break	5 minutes	5 minutes
Long break every	4 pomodoros	2 pomodoros
Long break	15 minutes	15 minutes

When I first tried the classic Pomodoro, I was cutting interesting discussions all the time. In practice, 50 minutes seems to work better.

People usually overflow the break, so most Pomodoros take a full hour instead of 55 minutes. Without enough breaks, people will get tired, and the workshop will not be as productive.

Use the breaks to adapt your facilitation

Breaks are crucial for the Event Storming to go well. People will need them to maintain enough energy, but we can also use them for facilitation. With the Double-Pomodoro technique, you should take a break every 50 minutes.

After the narrative storytelling, the agenda of an Event Storming is very flexible. As facilitators, breaks are the best opportunity to decide what to do next. Take this time to think about how the workshop is going. Discuss with some participants, get their feelings, and adapt the agenda.

You can skip some activities to leave more time for others. Or you can decide to dive into a Design-Level Event Storming on a particular subdomain. There is an infinity of options depending on your challenge.

Twice 2 hours per day is sustainable

Getting people to dedicate one or two full days to a workshop can be tricky. After four hours of Event Storming, people also get too tired to be effective.

The best schedule we found around these problems is to do two times, 2 hours per day.

• 2 hours in the morning
• lunch
• 2 hours in the afternoon
• repeat for as many days as needed

People will have time to rest. The breaks will also trigger their System 2 brains (background processing), and they might come back with new intelligent ideas!

Use regular ROTIs to adapt the agenda

With the large audience of an Event Storming, it’s easy to lose track of how things are going for everyone. A quick ROTI (Return On Time Invested) check every 2 hours does wonders. It consists of 2 questions:

1. Out of 5, what was the return on time invested (0: total waste of time, 5: could not be better invested)?
2. What would you have needed to get to 5?

It’s straightforward if you follow the 2 hours chunks. You only need to take 5 minutes before long breaks to get their feedback about the session. Use this feedback to decide what aspect of the problem to work on next.

Re-narrate to help new joiners (and others) catch up

It’s a fact: some people will miss parts of the workshop. Many of us suffer from overbooked agendas. Finding 8 hours where everyone is available is not easy. Some people will miss the beginning, the end, or a part in the middle.

New joiners will have difficulty catching up when collective intelligence is already growing. A good workaround is to re-narrate whenever someone joins.

The 2 hours chunks schedule also makes this easy. Plan 10 minutes at the beginning of every chunk for this storytelling.

Optimize the time of Domain and UX experts

This tip is most relevant in Design-Level Event Storming. Many steps are pretty straightforward, almost mechanic, they are mere pre-requisite to the critical steps: business rules and UX exploration.

These mechanic steps don’t need the experts. Also, we don’t want to waste their time. The simplest thing to do is get through these steps as quickly as possible. Explain what to do and ask everyone to take part. Don’t hesitate to timebox to one minute to get everybody to participate!

Finally, exploring the UX of all screens and Business Rules takes some time. If the group waits for two specific people to discuss all the topics, the workshop will take ages! This is the case of a single discussion bottleneck, and you need to split the group. Event Storming makes it easy to work in parallel! UX experts can work on UX while domain experts discuss business rules. With enough experts, you might have many groups working on UX or business rules simultaneously!

Remember these tips

These tips are simple yet powerful! Add them to your agenda when facilitating your Event Storming to ensure you remember them.

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This blog post is part of the 1h Event Storming book that we are currently writing.

This post was built from 3 posts originally published on Philippe’s blog 7 tactics that will make your DDD Design-Level Event Storming pay-off, 21 More Event Storming Tips, and 4 tips that will make your DDD Big Picture Event Storming successful