What is a Workshop Preparation Call?
This is an activity that is designed as a precursor to an Architectural Workshop, such as the Infrastructure Architecture Workshop. The outputs from the call are:
- A list of identified stakeholders and their areas of interest
- An agenda of workshops, with each workshop identified by subject matter and attendees
Why use it?
The workshop preparation call should be used to set the agenda and scope of one or more workshops. Workshops are typically of the following types:
- Discovery Workshops - to understand the AS-IS situation.
- Requirements Workshops - to understand the TO-BE situation.
- Architectural Elaboration Workshops - to collaboratively design an architecture that addresses the customers requirements.
Related Activities
The Workshop Preparation Call is a sub-activity of the following activities:
Who do you need?
The following actors should attend the preparation call:
From the Customer:
- Product Owner
- Project Manager
- Architect(s)
From the Solution Provider:
- Project Manager
- Architect(s)
- Presales Engineer
Suggested Time
The activity should not take longer than an hour.
Difficulty
- Facilitator: Easy
- Participants: Moderate
This activity is primarily a non-technical planning and logistics activity. It simply requires participants to understand stakeholders’ areas of responsibility, and be able to allocate stakeholders to workshops. Stakeholders will also need to be empowered to make the commitment to attend their assigned workshops.
Facilitation Materials Needed
- Videoconferencing
- Any customer briefing material distributed to participants
Process Phase
The Workshop Preparation call is usually the first phase of a project, as it sets the agenda for the architectural workshop phase of the overall project. phase activity in a project.
Delivery
The facilitator of the call (usually the Solution Provider PM) does the following:
- Asks all participants to introduce themselves and briefly describe their area of responsibility and how it pertains to the project
- Explain the purpose of the call: to create an agenda for the Architectural Workshop
- Asks the Solution Provider Architect to list the workshops that she thinks are required. See below for typical workshops that are required for the majority of projects.
- Determine the number and subject are of workshops that need to be run.
- Determine the participants required to attend each workshop.
- Work with the Customer Project Manager to find suitable timings for each workshop such that required attendees can attend.
- Finalise the agenda and communicate it to all workshop participants.
A call planning script is available [here]() (Red Hat Internal Use Only)
An agenda template is available [here]() (Red Hat Internal Use Only)
Workshops Required
The workshops required vary depending on the type of project being delivered by typically fall into the following classes:
- Requirements workshop(s) attended by the Solution Provider Architect, the Product Owner and Customer Architects. Requirements workshops will usually focus on functional requirements, AS-IS and TO-BE.
- Non-functional requirements workshops attended by the Solution Provider Architect, and Customer Subject Matter Experts in e.g. security, networking, storage, virtualisation. These workshops are to capture requirements in addition to the primary functional requirements of the solution.
- Architecture Elaboration workshops. These follow on from the requirements workshops and allow the Solution Provider Architect to describe an initial architecture which addresses customer requirements, and discuss it with stakeholders.