Barcelona EventStorming for Startups and Businesses Meetup

*** Goals ***
1. Raise awareness and experience the benefits of EventStorming in a startup or a business.
2. Create a network of EventStormers to empower its use and share experiences.
3. EventStorming as a catalyst and entry point to embrace Domain-Driven Design in your organization.

*** Purpose ***
Spread EventStorming practice to startups, businesses and all types of organisations.

*** Is this Meetup for you? ***
The short answer is almost certainly yes.
The long answer is that EventStorming has different levels of application and formats thus targets a wide variety of audience and situations. Since it can be applied to any organization, lines of business or business processes it implies tons of job roles or positions coming from different fields and disciplines.
For example: startup founders, stakeholders, project managers, product owners, engineers, C-levels, digital business owners, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, business analysts, designers, ... and so forth. In summary any employee in an organisation who cares about the business processes, their particular point of view and part of responsibility, is curious and open-minded towards the big picture of the organisation and invest and search how to continuously improve and bring value to the organisation. The organisation culture, hierarchy or structure in departments or multidisciplinary teams (marketing, sales, accounting, product development, IT, business development, UX, legal, QA, ...) should not be a constraint to apply EventStorming.

*** EventStorming ***
• What is EventStorming?
EventStorming is a convenient tool (not the goal) performed in a workshop format with some key ingredients: 1. invite the right people, 2. provide the illusion of an unlimited modelling space and 3. one facilitator in charge of providing guidance and making sure everything runs smoothly. It has different levels of application and formats. The process of running the workshop and the outcomes achieved at the end provides so much value for the organisation that should be the trigger for the next actions to take.

• How can I leverage EventStorming?
Either in a startup or in a business:
- As a tool that is inclusive to everyone willing to participate and requires no previous knowledge.
- As an alternative or complimentary tool with a broader scope in comparison with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), activity diagrams (in UML), software requirements gathering and many more. Furthermore, a tool to be integrated with already existing tools to avoid blind spots or biases.
- To explore the alignment between the current or expected business model and rules with the status quo crossing silo boundaries and exploring the value proposition (value created and destroyed along the flow) along business processes. Consequently it serves as a tool to emerge the purpose of the organisation.
- To reduce the gap between the business and the technology and allow them to share a common language and learn quickly putting together all the pieces to have a clear snapshot of the current level of understanding.
- To take advantage of the different levels of application EventStorming offers: 1. the big picture of an organisation, a business line or a business process, 2. modelling business processes and services, 3. and even modelling software. 
- To take advantage of the different formats EventStorming offers: 1. to discover and explore a new project in any business field (for instance and in the case of software: from the view of a software company/consultancy or a business outsourcing software development so that it reduces the usually broken approach of software requirements gathering) or to “simply” understand what the organisation, a line of business or a business process does (big picture of the state of the art emerging and challenging the status quo), 2. to run a team or organisation retrospective on the problems surfaced during the recent work delivered, 3. to bring new hires up to date (induction/onboarding) after recruitment, 4. to create several versions of your lean canvas or business model canvas (exploring value).
In a Startup:
- As a tool for creating multiple variations of your lean canvas in whatever stage you are (problem-solution fit or problem-market fit). You achieve it challenging, exploring and discovering alternatives along the flow rearranging it pinpointing the places where the relevant metrics should be captured or problems emerge.
- As a tool to be used actively when pivoting. In fact, EventStorming merge and incorporate natively Lean and Theory of Constraints.
In a Business:
- Similar to a startup, as a tool for creating multiple variations of your business model canvas innovating in business processes. You achieve it in the same way and most often the result is guided by emerging the current status quo of the business processes within the organization to locate the high priority pain points to be solved which often resides in the no man’s land responsibility.

• EventStorming, a brief background summary
EventStorming was born within the Domain-Driven Design community. It all started on 2012 when Alberto Brandolini came up with the idea of an "Event-Based modelling workshop“, which was presented at the Italian Agile Day. Initially it was used as a tool for the Domain-Driven Design technical people and was focused on a narrow scope. The experimentation made it evolve to the point it turned out to be a tool with different degrees of application: 1. from a big picture of your organisation, line of business or business processes, 2. modelling processes and services, and 3. modelling software systems (the initial focus). In 2013 a new catchy name (EventStorming) was conceived, it started to gain track among other practitioners and the first blog post was published (the first link below). As time goes by it’s an expanding practice.
http://ziobrando.blogspot.com/2013/11/introducing-event-storming.html
https://www.eventstorming.com/
https://leanpub.com/introducing_eventstorming

Thoughtworks is a respectable global technology company that provides software design and delivery, and pioneering tools and consulting services worldwide. Since 2010 and between 1-3 times a year elaborates and publish a Technology Radar. Last November 2018, EventStorming was the only technique stated as to be adapted by organisations:
https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/event-storming
https://assets.thoughtworks.com/assets/technology-radar-vol-19-en.pdf (pages 4, 5 and 7)

(My personal opinion in terms of startup jargon and borrowing the words introduced in the “Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore”, the state of the art of EventStorming in 2019 is located between the last stage of innovators and the first one of early adopters.)

*** Format ***
1. Talk (related to EventStorming)   + Questions and Answers + Networking
2. Applying EventStorming. Let us know your business or startup domain (it could even be an idea or fictitious) in advance sending your proposal filling out this open form: http://bit.ly/business-startup-domain
Then during the Meetup we will work together and experiment modelling it with EventStorming to achieve your initially intended purpose.
3. Informal gathering to share experiences.

*** Venue ***
We are constantly looking for a venue to hold upcoming Meetups. If you would like to be the host or to provide some sponsorship send a message to the organiser. We’ll be really excited and grateful to collaborate together. You are encouraged to actively take part. Feel free to send a message to the organiser or just leave a comment with your standpoint, talk proposal or bring and offer your particular real case example over which we’ll apply EventStorming.

*** Language ***
English (default), Spanish or Catalan. But it might depend on attendee’s preference.

*** Roots ***
This Meetup group was born as a branch of the Domain-Driven Design Barcelona Meetup (https://www.meetup.com/dddbcn/)

(Last update 22/03/2023)