Impact mapping, story mapping and valuable user stories
Have you struggled to split user stories into small but valuable chunks? Do you have problems prioritising stories or getting a commitment from business stakeholders on what they want to achieve?
Do you have issues deciding when a story is done or how many other stories you really need to achieve a business objective? Are you managing large amounts of stories that are problematic to estimate, prioritise or plan for?
If so, join this interactive Product Owner Key Skills Workshop with Gojko Adzic and bring your product owners and business sponsors to learn how to get the most out of user stories.
About the workshop
This is a brand new course based on Gojko Adzic’s books Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories, Impact Mapping and years of experience helping teams deliver better software.
Join Gojko to learn several effective ways that industry-leading teams apply to make their user stories much more effective, how to ensure that things coming into your work stream are defined well, split to be small enough but valuable, and how to achieve the big benefits of adaptive planning and that you can expect from great user stories.
Program
Day 1
Morning:
- How to effectively work with a large existing backlog of stories
(story card hell) with multiple competing stakeholders - How to capture and describe real value with small user stories that
just contribute to a larger picture - How to measure progress better than with just story points and avoid
mistaking activity for success.
Afternoon:
- How to avoid water-scrum-fall where too many things need to come
together to make a release and it’s not easy to come up with small but
valuable chunks - How impact mapping can help facilitate the discussion around value and success
- How to run impact mapping sessions
- How to use impact maps to align competing stakeholders and for
product discovery.
Day 2
Morning:
- How to get good feedback from users and how to avoid misleading feedback
- How to split the stories that are too big but difficult to slice
- How to avoid technical stories.
Afternoon:
- How to incorporate results of user research into release planning
- How to use story maps to plan releases for larger pieces of work,
when there is significant risk in releasing the wrong product so
iterative improvements are not an option - How to facilitate story mapping workshops and avoid the most common
problems with them.
What you will learn
After the workshop, you will know how to:
- Fight a huge backlog with 500 crap stories
- Prioritise with multiple competing stakeholders
- Avoid a user story stream of consciousness and create a big picture for prioritisation
- Establish a good reporting structure on outcomes rather than just monitoring velocity and activity
- Get agreement from the whole team and the business sponsors about which user stories are useful and which are just noise
- Enable business sponsors to benefit from flexible scope and avoid water-scrum-fall
- Effectively prioritise based on value
- Avoid pet features
- Run impact mapping sessions
- Split the unsplittable stories, and ensure that work items are small but actually still valuable
- Avoid getting stuck in technical stories.
Target audience
This is a training course for a broad audience of anyone involved in iterative (agile/lean/scrum/kanban) delivery with user stories.
- Business sponsors will learn how to ensure their organisation benefits more from agile team delivery capability.
- Analysts and Product Owners will learn how to link between business sponsors and teams more effectively
- Developers and testers will learn how to engage with business stakeholders and product owners to get better direction and focus delivery on things that really matter.
