How Norconsult saves time and designs better learning experiences with SessionLab

A team-focused approach to leadership and project management development

Norconsult’s competence development team in HR plays a central role in developing leaders and project managers across the organization.

From multi-day programs to one-day seminars, they design and run sessions for colleagues in locations ranging from Oslo to Copenhagen and Stockholm to Bergen.

As Christian notes, the scale of these programs can be massive:

“Our main audience is internal—leaders and project managers across the group. One example is our annual leadership forum, where over 700 leaders participate in one to two-day sessions throughout the year. Each event has slightly different constraints—start times, lunch breaks, venue restrictions—so no two agendas are exactly the same. For that, we’ve created an agenda in SessionLab.”

To manage events of such complexity and scale, Norconsult needed a tool that could help them design effectively, make changes efficiently and which helped them stay organized. As a result of these needs, they turned to SessionLab.

Saving time and managing complexity with ease

While planning, adapting and running Norconsult’s annual leadership forum at different locations, Christian found SessionLab was instrumental in making it happen.

“We designed a core one-day agenda with all the modules. But because each event is in a different location, the timing always shifts—starting early or late, changing breaks, or accommodating local logistics.

Without SessionLab, updating all those versions in Word or Excel would have doubled the amount of time we spent.”

Using SessionLab’s drag-and-drop interface, visual timeline, and automatic timing calculations Christian was able to quickly update agendas and navigate local changes without additional busywork. The result? Less time fiddling with formatting, more time focusing on delivering exceptional group work and training.

“Without Session Lab, I would have been inefficient and possibly quite frustrated. Also, things might not have run smoothly.”

Visual clarity and better-designed sessions

Norconsult is an organization that values thoughtful facilitation and experiential learning – whether that’s in their training part or for internal workshops focusing on innovation. When it comes to creating the timelines, SessionLab provides Christian and his team with an essential design benefit.

“I’m a visual person. I use color coding in SessionLab to mark different types of activities—yellow for giving information, orange for content delivery, red for group work, pink for plenary reflection. It helps me instantly see if the flow is balanced. Too much yellow and orange? That’s a warning signal for me—we’re missing interactivity.”

The color-coded timeline gives the team a quick, visual way to assess whether the session design supports engagement and deeper learning. When they make changes, the timing of the session automatically updates, so the team is able to see the impact of any changes and make informed decisions about what to cut, add and keep in the agenda.

Supporting collaboration and quick alignment

The team often collaborates with HR business partners and senior leaders—like local managers or the CEO—who contribute to the training. Sharing the agenda and keeping everyone aligned is crucial.

“I use the different sharing options all the time. The detailed agenda goes to the delivery team, so they can follow updates live. For presentations, I’ll use the high-level view to show the flow without overwhelming them with detail.”

SessionLab helps the team not only co-design internally but also share clear session plans with facilitators and stakeholders—saving time, getting buy-in and making running sessions a breeze.

Christian and the team will use custom printouts of the agenda to facilitate a session. He finds the materials list especially useful when it comes to preparing to run a workshop.

“Keeping track of materials is super efficient with SessionLab. Adding materials for each block and getting the materials list is fantastic.

So every time we say, “Oh, I’m doing a training session tomorrow. What do I need?”—here’s the list in SessionLab. Tick, tick, tick.”

Norconsult also uses SessionLab templates as the backbone of their ongoing training programs and courses. 

With a single source of what works well for these courses in SessionLab, Norconsult is able to maintain best practices and speed up the design and delivery of future courses.

“We also have a project manager’s course and a leadership initiation course that are set in SessionLab. We use these as  templates, and as we learn things from evaluations and running those courses, we tweak things.”

Growing organically with facilitator training

Norconsult’s use of SessionLab has grown steadily over the years, starting with a few licenses in the Innovation department and expanding through the organization. 

“When we ran our Innovation Leader Program—a five-module, two-day-per-module course—we realized we needed a better system to track everything. That’s when we introduced SessionLab. Now, every year we train around 15 new internal facilitators, and we introduce them to SessionLab as part of the program.”

This facilitator training has helped spread adoption organically across teams and departments, especially among consultants running collaborative or creative workshops. By having templates and reusable sessions centralized in SessionLab, onboarding those new facilitators is made even easier. The result is a company-wide culture of facilitation that continues to grow.  

SessionLab as a must-have tool for effective workshops

From keeping track of materials and tweaking timelines to creating better learning flows and training programs, the impact of SessionLab for Norconsult is clear.

“I couldn’t do my job without SessionLab. I’d pay for it out of my own pocket if I had to—it saves so much time and frustration.”

For Christian, the impact extends beyond his own experience designing and running training sessions and workshops. Facilitators and trainers across the organization have been able to bring the power of facilitation and efficient agenda design to their roles. 

“SessionLab helps us to create alignment quicker. If we can save time, we can deliver more effective services. Because of SessionLab, the impact of what we deliver in the end—the quality of the training or the quality of the workshop—is going to be better. We can focus on the process and the people.”