Brainstorming: how to facilitate collaborative workshops remotely with Klaxoon
Published on February 14, 2025
Jérôme Le Hénaff
Third Parties RIP project manager at Orange
Isabelle Adam and Jérôme Le Hénaff work for Orange’s Western Assistance Team. They have chosen Klaxoon to manage and coordinate the roll-out of Orange’s fiber network in western France.
The challenge: manage a project through participative remote workshops
To find solutions to optimize the deployment of fibre-optics and ensure it interconnects with the networks in western France, Jérôme prepares and leads remote collaborative workshops with twenty people located across the region. He uses Klaxoon so that they can work together to develop solutions for everything from contracting and launch through to subscriptions and ongoing management.
Watch the video to see Isabelle and Jérôme’s tips on preparing and leading collaborative workshops with Klaxoon:
Klaxoon reshapes attitudes and ways of working so that we can keep moving forward on our projects. Jérôme Le Hénaff, Third-party Public Initiative Network Project Manager, Orange
The solution: with Board, create a place to share and centralize information
Jérôme’s goal is to make long-term projects more efficient and reduce deployment lead times. To work on these lead times, he (remotely) brings twenty together people from Orange’s Western Assistance Team in six different departments across the region. These functional teams look after deployment, project steering, operations management and testing. Jérôme creates a Network to bring everyone involved together within a private digital workspace so that they can work hand in hand remotely on various issues.
The Network which team members can access. This is where Jérôme keeps all his Klaxoon activities.
I chose to create a Network because our main priority was to be able to manage information and control who could access it. I could then invite the members that I wanted to involve.
Jérôme uses a very simple Article in four stages to make sure that the Network members have read the information they need to get started with Klaxoon.
First, Jérôme directs Network members to an Article that he has written, with links to other activities.
Move from ideas to prioritizing tasks as a team
Before the meeting, Jérôme opens a Board and creates a zone for each of the topics to be covered during the workshop. On the day of the meeting, they set up a teleconference bridge and invite participants to connect to the Board in one click via the Network.
An icebreaker to get the collaborative workshop off to a great start
To start the meeting, each participant posts an idea on the Board on how they’re feeling that day. This short activity acts as an icebreaker, getting everyone involved in the first few minutes of the meeting and allowing Jérôme to see very easily who is present.
A retrospective to take stock as a team
Then, the team does a quick retrospective by running through the different topics: what’s working well at Orange, what could be improved, root causes, etc.
We all feel like we’re involved, even though there are a lot of us at the meeting. Everyone puts forward ideas, they’re grouped together, and then it’s over to us - the ideas give us the opportunity to speak up and that’s an advantage for us as participants. Isabelle Adam, Customer Experience Project Manager, Orange
To move around the Board and display the zones on the participants’ screens, Jérôme uses the Synchro.
Use the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize tasks as a team
To prioritize the actions that must be taken to address the various issues, the team looks at each action in terms of potential impact and effort required. For this, Jérôme adds to the Board matrices inspired by the Eisenhower Matrix, created by Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th President of the USA), who prioritized tasks based on urgency and importance. Jérôme uses several stages to encourage collective decision-making:
- Before the workshop starts, he creates the matrices on the Board and defines categories of ideas based on the themes to be covered during the meeting.
- During the workshop, the participants select a category for each idea that they post.
- Once the initial ideation phase is complete, each person 'likes' the ideas they think are the best.
- He then asks the group to move these ideas, as they see fit, into the impact-effort matrix. This matrix has two axes: the impact an idea will have, and how difficult it will be to implement.
- Using the matrices, Jérôme can visualize which ideas score well in terms of the impact to effort ratio and which are also popular. From this, it is easy to create a list of actions to implement.
Each participant posts their ideas into the Eisenhower Matrix created directly on the Board by Jérôme.
The result: reinforced feedback for continuous improvement
To finish the workshop on a strong, positive note, Jérôme uses a closing activity. On the Board, he has created a simple zone called “round the campfire”. Each person puts something into it - an image, a comment, a drawing, etc. - to show how the workshop went for them. Jérôme finds this feedback very constructive. He uses it as the basis for a continuous improvement strategy!
During the closing activity, each participant can say what they think and give feedback about the meeting.
Be like Isabelle and Jérôme: get your team working together remotely, prepare and facilitate online meetings and workshops easily with Klaxoon!
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