Who should read this book?
Leaders & Managers who want to create a strategic plan or roadmap
Note that the target audience for the book is organisations who work Agile. That said, the concepts are easily applicable in organisations that don’t strictly work Agile.
Consultants who want to coach these Leaders & Managers.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
It is a very easy book to read (less than half a day) in a style that is pleasant to read (including drawings, quotes, examples & simple references).
The main concept presented is simple yet powerful.
The book also explains very well why applying such approach helps to
- Deal better with scope creep & pet peeves.
- Improve efficiency of meetings.
- Set better priorities.
- Monitor progress towards a common goal.
- Test assumptions.
So if you belong to the target audience, I think you should read this book!
Interesting extracts
“What can we do, as an organisation or a delivery team, to support the required impacts? These are the deliverables, software features and organisational activities. Delivery plans and requirements documents are often shopping lists of features, without any context that explains why such things are important. Without a clear mapping of deliverables to business objectives, and a justification of that mapping through impacts that need to be supported, it is incredibly difficult to argue about making or not making an investment in certain items. In larger organisations with many stakeholders or product sponsors, this leads to huge scope creep as everyone’s pet features and ideas are bundled in.”
“Many organisations fail to get the big benefits of user stories by creating too many stories at the beginning, describing the entire scope in order to keep track of everything that needs to be delivered. Major upfront analysis is reduced, but we’re left with a big story list. This leads to a huge number of stories that need to be tracked and managed, which is a waste of time. Even worse, when business circumstances change, such lists require a lot of effort to re-prioritise and understand. Jim Shore calls this ‘story card hell’.
Impact maps prevent story card hell. The reason why organisations get into this situation is that it is hard to let go of long-term plans. Business stakeholders who worry about their needs being forgotten insist that those needs get captured somehow. Instead of writing hundreds of low-level stories, impact maps allow us to capture stakeholder needs as actor behaviour impacts. We do not really need to discuss scope for anything but the most important actor impact for the moment. Once we start working on an impact, we can grow the scope. Instead of hundreds of stories, we can work with a map and a dozen stories at a time.”
“Ask: ‘If we achieve the key targets for metrics with a completely different scope than planned, have we succeeded?’ If the answer is ‘No’, go back to the start. you don’t have the right metrics.”