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 workshop and bring your product owners and business sponsors to learn how to get the most out of user stories.

The participants of this interactive workshop learn about the basics of Impact Mapping, and try it out in practice on several realistic examples to understand the key facilitation techniques and learn how to run and apply Impact Mapping sessions in their organisations.

Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique that helps organisations manage flexible roadmaps for iterative delivery, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better delivery decisions. Impact mapping can help you build products and deliver projects that make an impact, not just ship software.

• “I had the fortunate experience of attending Gojko Adzic’s workshop at Booster 2014 on improving user stories. I must say, that for me it was more like ‘radically rethinking the way you’re doing user stories’” Ørjan Taule
• “Clearly loads of insight and value + well worth doing” - Rory MacDonald
• “Enjoyable, interesting and useful course with engaging teacher”, Morven Ramsay
• “Engaging, informative and energizing - it’s a must”, Rob Malcom
• “Thought provoking! Inspired to try and implement the ideas in my team”, Gavin Bussey
• “Amazing, totally reshapes my mind about user stories”, Ben Hughes, Equinox IT

Key Learning Points  

• 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

Intended Audience 

This is a seminar 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, and how to steer product management and delivery better to achieve strategic goals faster.
• Analysts and Product owners will learn how to link between business sponsors and teams more effectively, how to select and prioritise stories and features to achieve better impacts
• 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

In order to attend the workshop, you should already have a basic knowledge of iterative delivery methods and a at least some experience of working in a Scrum, XP or Kanban-like delivery.

To get the most out of this workshop, you should have a relatively senior role, from a technical or business perspective.

Workshop Requirements

• Laptop with wifi-internet access. 
• An internet connection