In February 2013 Gojko Adzic hosted a meetup in London of a group of authors, speakers, consultants and practitioners who work in the area of focusing software development on ensuring the maximum business value is delivered for the investment of time and money.
The goal of the session was to identify the underlying principles and common ideas from a variety of techniques (such as impact mapping, feature injection, real options, hothousing, user story mapping and similar) which are aimed at product identification/project initiation.
According to Adzic's first blog about the event:
The room was full of people who have been spreading similar messages through conferences and books over the last few years, along with client-side early adopters of techniques such as impact mapping, feature injection, real options, hothousing, user story mapping and similar. The task we gave ourselves was to compare all those ideas and try to extract the essence into a strong message that would help teams take the next step, and say something like “it doesn’t matter which technique you use, but follow these principles and we believe you will be rolling out much more successful software”.
The group identified some underlying principles that help lead to more successful outcomes. Great results happen when:
- People know why they are doing their work
- Organisations focus on delivering outcomes and impacts rather than features
- Teams decide what to do next based on immediate and direct feedback from the use of their work
- Everyone cares
In his post, Adzic provides a detailed explanation of the ideas behind these points.
In addition to these principles, the group also came up with some practical steps that allow teams to get the most out of the tools and techniques. They produced a graphic which shows the steps:
Karl Scotland and Henrik Kniberg both posted about the event, and a Google+ community has been established to explore and extend the ideas.
In addition to Adzic the group consisted of Mary Poppendieck, Gabrielle Benefield, Tom Poppendieck, Gordon Weir, Henrik Kniberg, Jeff Patton, Ingrid Domingues, Karl Scotland, Russ Miles, Christian Hassa, Dulce Goncalves, Aaron Sanders, Shadi Almviken, Chris Matts, Olaf Lewitz and Matthias Edinger.
