The ability to organise and facilitate meetings / workshops is a key aspect of a well rounded UX deigner's skillset. On larger more long term projects this ability becomes vital, both at the start as well as during the entire design and testing phase.

The facilitator's role can be challenging, particularly where items being discussed are of particularly high importance or where members of the client team have had involvement in the production of a soon to be re-designed element of a website or application.

My skills and experience relating to meeting and workshop organsiation and facilitation can be summarised as follows:

Meetings / workshops with clients

Design kick off meeting - to agree to scope, boundries and opportunities for a given design phase
Workshop - discussing and analysing an existing website or application with business stakeholders to explore strengths and weaknesses of a current offering
Workshop - discussing and analysing the existing user base with business representatives and then formulating key user types and building them out into the user personas (to be used during the design process of a forthcoming project)
Workshop - with business representatives to agree ideal user journeys through to user task completion, and also to prioritise required features and functionality
Discovery meetings - with an existing site/application management team to get a clear understanding of current complexities (e.g. business logic, security permission configurations) to make sure that these are maintained in the new system
Design review meeting - to review the results of a given design phase so that comments and other feedback can be factored into design refinement

Meetings with the internal teams

Design kick off meeting - to explain the key objectives for a forthcoming design phase as well as to agree who will take responsibility for what, who will work with whom, who needs to meet with who, when does the design work need to be delivered, to whom and in what format.
Design review meeting - to ensure that the project team are happy with a given design route prior to it being presented to a client
Design walk through meeting - when working in an iterative methodology (e.g. Agile project methodology), then at the end of each design phase the new design work is presented to the relevant teams (both onshore and offshore) such as development, testing, and visual design (and sometimes the end client), either face to face or via a webex teleconference (i.e. including screen sharing), giving the audience the opportunity to provide feedback. This feedback can then be factored into the design specification as appropriate prior to the forthcoming development cycle
Informal design meeting - similar to the point above however this type of meeting happens on an adhoc basis whenever the need arises (e.g. is 'X' feasible within the project timeframes with 'Y' technology).

If you'd like to know more about my meeting / workshop facilitation skills and experience please contact me.