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Workshop Kits

Discovery Workshop

A discovery workshop aligns stakeholders on current-state systems, ownership, delivery paths, and risk themes. It should produce evidence requests and follow-up interviews, not pretend to answer everything in one meeting.

Audience

Invite representatives from:

  • Engineering leadership.
  • Product or business ownership.
  • Platform, SRE, or operations.
  • Security and compliance.
  • Service owners for critical systems.
  • Finance or cloud cost ownership when cost is in scope.

Agenda

Topic
Goals, scope, and constraints
Critical systems and business workflows
Delivery, runtime, and environment map
Incidents, risks, and known pain
Ownership and decision paths
Evidence requests and next steps

Facilitation prompts

  • Which systems cannot be down during business hours?
  • Which changes feel risky today?
  • Where do teams wait on other teams?
  • What manual steps are repeated often?
  • Which incidents changed behavior?
  • Which controls are hardest to prove during audits?

Outputs

  • Current-state sketch.
  • List of critical systems and owners.
  • Initial risk themes.
  • Open questions and evidence requests.
  • Follow-up interview list.

Watchouts

  • Loud opinions can hide missing evidence.
  • Workshops should not become tool-selection debates.
  • Capture disagreements as follow-up items instead of forcing false alignment.

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