Tuesday 8 April 2014

Impact Mapping In Action


The 5 minute presentation on "Impact Mapping" by our Agile Guru Em Campbell-Pretty during our Agile Trains unity day inspired me to put this technique in action. To deep dive in the topic, I did some research and read Gojko Adzic's book "Impact Mapping". The book is short, simple, to the point and you can literally cruise through this book in no time.

An impact map is a visualisation of scope and underlying assumptions and is created collaboratively by the technical and business teams. It is a mind map created by addressing 4 questions - WHY, WHO, HOW, WHAT

We used this technique for the Discovery workshops during the iteration. The typically expected outcome of the workshop is the light weight business case with vision, problem/solution statement, business drivers, features/stories (requirements) with acceptance criteria, solution overview, risks, assumptions, delivery timelines and cost benefit analysis. The impact mapping technique provides the framework and is very useful in capturing the information in structured way. Following framework was used to capture the requirements:

|WHY (Goals-what business outcome needs to be achieved)
|
|------------WHO (Actors/personas who carry out the activities/business process)
|
|------------HOW (All the activities they carry out during the business process  to achieve the goals)
|
|------------WHAT (Features/Stories and deliverables that are required to support the activities)



We also used impact mapping technique for the iteration planning. It helped the team to align their activities with the business objectives and prevented them from getting lost while delivering the projects. Following framework was used for iteration planning:

|WHY (Goals-what business outcome needs to be achieved at the end of the iteration)
|
|------------WHO (Actors- Customer,Team, Technical Governance, Systems Team, Program/Portfolio management, Production Support team....)
|
|------------HOW (DBT cycle, architecture, meetings, engagement, approvals....)
|
|------------WHAT (prioritised stories with acceptance criteria, communication plan, showcase plan)


Impact mapping technique has been of immense use to us and so far we have'nt come across any challenges in using this technique. Iam looking forward to use this technique in other avenues like stakeholder management, development planning, building high performance teams, agile coaching ..............................................

Thursday 9 January 2014

Overview Of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)


Scaled Agile Framework harnesses the power of Agile and Lean to address the complexity of software development in large IT enterprises. Using SAFe, many enterprises have experienced increased productivity, significant reduction in defects, faster time to market and happy customers and teams. Following is my presentation pack on Dean Leffingwell's Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).