The Architecture
Design Workshop
This DataDomine workshop is facilitated design work: a structured engagement in which the right people are brought into the same room, held to a rigorous method, and guided toward a decision or output that the organisation actually needs. The facilitator brings the process. The participants bring the problem. What the engagement produces is determined by what the work demands — a documented and defensible architectural decision, a resolved misalignment, or a written assessment of where a practice needs to go. The artefact is real. The decision it represents is real. The work is live from the first hour.
When to Engage
Three triggers.
One of them is yours.
A workshop is the right format when the problem is not a knowledge gap but a decision gap — when the issue is not that the right people do not know enough, but that the right people have not been in the same room, working on the same problem, under the right kind of structured pressure.
Trigger 01
The High-Stakes Decision
→ Format A
A consequential architectural decision is approaching and the team cannot afford to get it wrong. A platform choice with multi-year cost implications. A system boundary that will constrain everything built on top of it. A governance model that will either hold up under regulatory scrutiny or quietly undermine every system it governs. The issue is not that no one has a view — it is that the views have not been subjected to the kind of structured constraint analysis that produces a decision the organisation can actually stand behind. The workshop produces a documented architectural decision record with the constraint map and economic justification that defends it, written by the people who will be held to it.
Trigger 02
The Stuck Team
→ Format B
A cross-functional team is misaligned — on direction, on priorities, or on the nature of the problem itself. The misalignment may be visible as conflict, or it may be invisible as politeness: meetings that produce no decisions, roadmaps that reflect negotiated compromise rather than structural reasoning, technical work that keeps being sent back because the approval conditions were never clearly defined. The workshop surfaces the real disagreement, structures it, and produces a shared set of decisions the team can move from. What changes is not that everyone agrees — it is that the conflict is made legible, the decision criteria are explicit, and the next steps are documented and owned.
Trigger 03
The Capability Gap
→ Format C
A practice is scaling and the gap between where practitioners currently are and where the work requires them to be is becoming visible. The gap may be technical — practitioners who cannot make the economic case for their designs, or who cannot produce the governance artefacts that regulated production demands. It may be behavioural — a team that cannot hold its own in an architecture review board. It may be structural — a practice that has no shared definition of done, no consistent ADR methodology, no standard for what production-ready means in their specific context. The workshop produces a written capability gap assessment and a development path the practice lead can act on, not a generic training recommendation.
The Three Formats
Each format is matched
to its trigger.
Format A
Architecture Decision Workshop
How the day works
The morning is spent establishing the constraint map: what is fixed, what is flexible, what is non-negotiable from a regulatory, economic, or organisational perspective. The afternoon applies those constraints to the decision at hand, works through the options with structured facilitation, and produces the decision record in the room. Participants leave with a signed-off document, not an action item to write one.
Format B
Design Alignment Workshop
How the two days work
Day one surfaces the conflict: what each function believes the problem is, what each believes the constraints are, and where those beliefs diverge. The divergence is made explicit and documented before any attempt at resolution. Day two applies structured constraint analysis to the disagreements that matter — the ones that are blocking real work — and produces a set of decisions the team can act on, together with a documented register of unresolved conflicts and the conditions under which they would be resolved.
Format C
Capability Gap Assessment
How the day works
The morning is spent in structured diagnostic: practitioners work through a set of representative decisions and design challenges drawn from their actual context, with the facilitator observing the gaps in reasoning, artefact quality, and stakeholder navigation. The afternoon is the assessment: what the practice currently produces versus what production in their specific context actually requires, and the specific development path — with format recommendations, sequencing, and a rationale — that closes the distance.
Every Engagement
What is included as standard.
Regardless of format, every DataDomine workshop engagement includes the following. These are not add-ons. They are the conditions that allow the workshop itself to be effective.
Discovery conversation
A complimentary conversation before any commitment is made. The purpose is mutual: to establish whether the problem warrants a workshop, which format is the right fit, and whether DataDomine is the right facilitator for this particular engagement. If a workshop is not the right answer, that is said in the discovery conversation — not after a proposal has been accepted.
Written brief
A document confirmed with the sponsor before the workshop date. The brief defines the problem, the decision or output the engagement is designed to produce, the participants and their roles, and the constraints — organisational, regulatory, economic — that are in scope. A workshop without a confirmed brief does not run. The brief is what makes the day productive rather than exploratory.
Post-workshop artefact
A written document delivered within five working days of the engagement. The artefact records what was decided, what was not decided and why, the constraint map that governed the session, and — where applicable — the conflict register, the capability gap assessment, or the development path. This is not a summary of the day. It is the output the day was designed to produce, documented with the rigour that makes it usable.
Four-week follow-up
A thirty-minute call at four weeks. The purpose is to establish whether the decisions made in the workshop are holding, whether the artefact is being used, and whether anything has emerged since the engagement that changes the picture. This is not a check-in. It is a structured review of whether the workshop produced lasting output — and, if not, what that tells us about what the organisation still needs.
Pricing and Enquiry
Pricing is discussed
in the discovery
conversation.
Workshop pricing depends on the format, the number of participants, the complexity of the problem, and whether the engagement requires preparation work beyond the standard brief — for example, a pre-workshop review of existing architecture documentation or a structured pre-read for participants.
The discovery conversation is 30-minute no obligations complimentary session. It is the right place to discuss the problem, establish the format, and understand what the engagement will cost. There is no obligation following the discovery conversation, and no proposal is sent until both parties are confident that a workshop is the right approach.
Start the discovery conversation
The discovery conversation is complimentary. No obligation. No proposal until the fit is confirmed.
Enquire about a workshop