Building a complete session design workflow in SessionLab

Organizing everything involved in planning and running a session can be complex and time-consuming. 

Trainers need to connect needs assessment and training needs to their agenda design. Stakeholders need to be consulted and give their approval. Feedback needs to be collected, impact determined and reports created. 

All of this while trying to project manage and create repeatable processes to save your team time and effort in the future. It’s a lot of work and mental load that can get in the way of designing exceptional participant experiences and creating lasting impact. 

Whether you’re leading a training team or a solo consultant, SessionLab’s industry leading agenda planner has always been about saving you time and effort when creating your agenda. 

Now, SessionLab makes it easy to streamline the entire planning workflow in one place and automate tedious tasks with AI assistance. You and your team can remove complexity and busywork from your process and improve the quality of work across the board.

Let’s dive in.

1. Capture key information in a session brief

Agendas need context and background information in order to be fit-for-purpose. What expectations does your client have? What outcomes are expected? Who will be there and when is your session going to be held? 

Collecting this information —and ensuring it is accessible to everyone who needs it—can make for a much smoother design process. Nothing is missed, key context is captured and stakeholders can get aligned in minutes. 

With Pages, you can collect all this supporting information in SessionLab, right where you need it most. Collect your brief, map out logistics, and create to-do lists that support your project with a flexible document that lives alongside your agenda.

Examples of how SessionLab users are using Pages

• Brief for stakeholders and facilitators 
• Notes from client discovery calls and rough ideas
• Problem framing, session objectives and desired outcomes
• To-do lists, project timelines and key dates
• Participant list containing contact details, requirements and key context
• Client handovers and facilitator guides

2. Transform planning materials into a structured agenda

Designing the flow of your agenda is where sessions start to come to life. In SessionLab, you can start with a blank agenda or use the AI assistant to instantly turn a brief into a first draft, ready to refine. 

You can even start with a file upload. Turn a PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text file, image, and more into a SessionLab agenda, complete with blocks, instructions and timings. 

In SessionLab’s industry-leading agenda planner, drag, drop and rearrange blocks to easily rearrange your flow. Whenever you make changes, your timing will automatically recalculate, helping your stay organized and saving you heaps of busywork. 

Speed up your design process further by making agenda-wide changes with conversational prompts and AI-powered actions. Add breaks and icebreakers, summarize the goals and outcomes for a stakeholder or create a feedback form. 

The AI Assistant produces results based on your context. The more information included in your brief or your workspace-wide context folder, the better the output. 

3. Collaborate efficiently with co-facilitators and stakeholders

With SessionLab, sending document versions back and forth over email is a thing of the past. Organze your agenda and planning materials in one place where collaborators can co-create, edit and leave comments. Whether you work together asynchronously or in real-time, it’s easy to keep track of changes and ensure a smooth collaborative workflow.

Stay in control with simple editing and viewer controls. Get collaborators up to speed with a simple briefing document, facilitator guide or project timeline attached to your agenda.

Don’t want clients to get lost in the details? Share a simple online overview or create a custom view containing only what they need to know with flexible columns.

In SessionLab, collaboration is simple and efficient. You and your team can focus on designing, and not on chasing documents and digging up emails. 

4. Prepare for delivery with professional materials 

Once your session is finalized, SessionLab makes it easy to create and share professional materials in a beautiful, easy-to-understand format.

Quickly get stakeholder approval by sharing a simple, visual overview of your session. Export your session to Word, PDF, PPT and customize to your needs.

Hide columns, adjust the layout, and include Pages without the hassle of manual design work. Add a facilitator guide with detailed instructions to the agenda so every facilitator can deliver the session with confidence. 

SessionLab also makes it easy to collect all the materials your facilitators need on the day of the session. Attach slide decks, printouts and additional materials to your agenda for easy referral and sharing. 

Add a pre-flight checklist with logistics, contact numbers and key links to support session delivery on the day. With all your planning and delivery materials attached to the session, facilitation is smooth and organized. 

5. Collect and Analyse Feedback

Feedback is one of the most valuable tools in facilitation. Input from stakeholders and participants provides insight that can improve the quality of sessions and is essential for long-term improvement.

However, facilitators often lack an easy, systematic way of collecting and analysing feedback. It’s one more thing on a long to-do list and it can be hard to find the time and space.

With SessionLab Forms, it’s easy to consistently collect feedback without additional mental load or busy-work.

Instantly generate a feedback form based on your agenda with the AI assistant. Tweak your questions easily with the dynamic form builder and share a QR code or direct link with participants. Responses are collected in your session alongside your agenda. No more switching tools or losing insights. 

Export responses as a .CSV or ask AI to summarize key findings and suggest improvements to your agenda based on feedback.

Never miss the opportunity to gain insights and improve the quality of your sessions again. Demonstrate value to your stakeholders and create key deliverables with ease. 

6. Document outcomes and produce reports

So the session is over. Now is the time to close the loop, follow up with participants and produce post-session reports.

With tight turnaround times and more workshops to design and facilitate, this can be a lot to handle. But with SessionLab, it’s easy to organize your post-session process and follow best practices, every time. 

Ask AI to summarize feedback and collate your findings into a client report, ready for you to enrich with your own insights. Because your briefing, agenda, feedback responses and notes are all in one place, it’s easy to stay organized and contextualize your findings.

Export the materials you want to share with your client and stakeholders as a PDF, Word or PPT and easily produce key deliverables and reports.

7. Reuse what works and optimize your design process 

Experienced facilitators and L&D teams rarely design completely from scratch. Every agenda you design and activity you run can serve as the basis for future sessions, but only if they’re easy to find, reuse and adapt.

In SessionLab, you can turn successful sessions into reusable templates and keep them organized in one-place. 

Save your agenda, planning documents and forms in a single template and kickstart future designs. Ensure every session follows a proven process, maintains best practices and stays consistent across your team. 

Examples of complete end-to-end design processes include:

• Proven workshop and meeting formats with a brief and feedback form as standard.
• Recurring training programs, complete with a facilitator guide and training materials for easy rollout and delivery. 
• Multi-day events with stakeholder lists, timelines and key actions attached.

With your end-to-end design workflows organized in SessionLab, facilitators and trainers never need to start with a blank canvas and can easily find a proven structure for their needs.

With templates, teams can reduce preparation time while ensuring a proven, consistent structure is followed by every facilitator and designer. Quality standards are maintained and the feedback and improvement loop is kept in place, even at scale.

How a connected workflow strengthens facilitation practices 

Bringing the entire design workflow into SessionLab is all about making the complex art of designing and delivering sessions simpler.

Rather than getting lost with multiple tools and repetitive busywork, SessionLab now helps you organize your workflow in a single place and streamline your process. Here’s how:

• Consistent alignment with stakeholder goals. By ensuring all important context is collected together, it’s easier to make design decisions based on learning objectives and desired outcomes. Everyone involved can get aligned easily and find everything they need in a single source of truth.
• Faster preparation cycles. Reusing existing materials and workflows helps speed up the design process and keep things running smoothly. Rather than starting from a blank canvas, your team can kickstart your design process with a proven structure.
• Easier reporting and continuous improvement cycles. With Forms connected to sessions, it’s easier to connect outcomes to objectives and collate feedback when it comes in. Track impact over time, ask AI to help with reports and insights and improve your facilitation practice.
• Systematize your process and ensure your proven workflow is followed, every time. When teams need to redesign from scratch, it’s easy for something to be missed or for inconsistencies to creep in. With a proven playbook to follow, standards are maintained and facilitators are supported at every stage of the design journey.
• Context-aware AI built on your content and instructions. Set workspace-wide AI context to get consistent results tailored to your preferred frameworks. AI-powered actions can help make smart changes to your session or generate materials instantly. Use AI to do busywork and help with sensemaking, not to replace creativity.  
• Present professionally. Whether you’re sharing a brief with a client or a report with stakeholders, everything looks polished and cohesive. With a simple visual overview and connected documents, it’s easy to guide stakeholders through a plan and get approval and tell the story of what happened afterwards.

SessionLab users like Luisia at Vlerick Business School are already seeing the benefits of  uniting their team’s workflow in a single, connected environment. 

SessionLab is helpful with alignments and processes. As our team has grown, it’s now easier to adapt the process, because it’s all there in SessionLab.

Christian Valentiner at Norconsult is also finding a lot of value in using SessionLab to create reusable training programs at scale and encourage a culture of continuous improvement.   

“We 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.”

Whether you’re a freelance facilitator wanting to deliver more value to clients or an L&D team designing programs at scale, SessionLab can help you maintain clarity, consistency, and professional standards throughout the entire lifecycle of a session. 

Check out this example template, complete with a brief, feedback form and client report to see how a connected workflow can work for you.

In conclusion

Designing workshops and training programs can amount to a lot of complex busywork. From organizing background information and chasing stakeholders to crafting an agenda and analyzing feedback: it all adds up.

But it can be made simpler.

With a connected workflow that supports your end-to-end planning process, SessionLab can help you focus on what matters most and facilitate with confidence.

Want to learn more? Check out our 3-minute video to see a connected workflow in action or get started by signing up for free.

James Smart Head of Content

James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.