User Story Mapping is a very important step for a team to organize the backlog. In order to explain the importance of User Story Mapping, we, as All4Agile, conducted a workshop in the schedule of Agile Turkey Summit 2019 on 24th of October.
We lived a very joyful 40 minutes with our attendees while we are experiencing how to organize a backlog and power of story mapping. The theme was very extraordinary. We mapped the Wedding Ceremony Day Organization stories of an epic love story characters Leyla and Mecnun.
We gathered our attendees around tables in 6 different groups with max 10 members, and we asked them to imagine their dream wedding ceremony with 500.000 TL (ca. 80.000 USD) budget. In the first phase they were asked to write down all the tasks for this magical day in 15 minutes, such as selecting wedding invitation cards, preparing wedding guest list etc.. First of all, each team should define a vision, by deciding on a different wedding ceremony style, eg. poolside wedding, pampas grass wedding and select a business owner as decision maker, and of course those were the brides. Business owners would be marking the ‘MUST’ tasks with a color pen and the teams were asked to note the cost of tasks on the sticky notes. Especially for the cost estimation, recently married team members’ experiences were quite helpful.
In 15 minutes all teams wrote the tasks on yellow sticky notes with verbs, sticked them on the wall, eliminated the duplicates and collected the tasks under main activities, those were asked to be written on different colored sticky notes.
In this 15 minutes time period, all these 6 teams tried to write down as many tasks they can.
When the first phase finished, we declared the teams that, due to an unexpected reason, wedding ceremony budget has been decreased to 50.000 TL (Almost 8.000 USD) from 500.000 TL (80.000 USD). For that reason they had to re-evaluate their priorities in 5 minutes by keeping the vision. Now they had a time and budget restriction.
When this 5 minutes finished we asked all the teams to explain one by one how did they manage their user story mapping according to the changes and which user stories were eliminated. The outcomes were really strange :) One team eliminated wedding rings, other team eliminated after party, one team decided to change cadillac to father’s car as wedding car, one team decided not to spent for a DJ instead to ask their friends to play guitar in the wedding ceremony etc.
It was really a very effective 40 minutes to experience the importance of Mapping, MVP and agility for adapting to the changes. Of course it was not just a workshop, for some of our attendees it was a great inspiration how to get prepared for their own wedding ceremony :) Thank you very much to all our attendees for sharing and attending to this enjoyable workshop, to @Barry Overeem for his great guidance about how to facilitate such a workshop, to my teammate @Rıdvan Akçiçek for his endless support, exchange of information and workshop friendship, to @Fatoş Alikılıç for her support and wonderful wedding ceremony sketching, to @Ferda Doyranlı for her kind help during the workshop.