Gojko Selfie!! A Brief Introduction to Impact Mapping

Hey all,

Check out this bad ass selfie:

Earlier this week, Orion Health's Continuous Delivery guru, Richard Paul and I had the pleasure of attending Gojko Adzic's brilliant course on Impact Mapping!  For those of you who don't know who Gojko is, he's considered as one of the game changing minds in the Software industry today.  He travels the world consulting for Software firms in trouble and running courses on Agile, BDD and more!  

He is also the author of the hallowed tome of BDD, Specification by Example!

Impact Mapping is all about mapping from an organisational goal to a solution by identifying the impact the solution has on the relevant users.  Gojko argues that the only reasonable impact to observe is a change in behaviour in your users.

One great example he presented us with was a Facebook games development company he consulted to.  They wanted to introduce a whole host of features including the posting of levels and achievements, and invites to friends in the hopes of increasing their player base.  Before they went ahead and shipped all of these features, Gojko had them draw an impact map from their goal to their solutions as follows:

From this they identified slices through the map, one such slice being:

• Goal: 1 Million Players
• Actors: Players
• Impact on/change in behaviour of Actors: Players Posting more about the game on Facebook
• Solution: Ability to post Level-ups to Facebook wall

Using the divine powers of Agile, the company pushed out just this feature and paid close attention to the pertinent metrics:

• Are people posting more about the game to Facebook? (The Impact)
• Are we closer to having 1 million players on Facebook? (The Goal)

What they found was that there was no marked change in behaviour:  no one wanted to spam their friends' news feeds when they became a Level 7 Wizard.  No impact was observed and obviously, no progress towards the goal was made.

Following this, they sliced the Semi-automated invites feature and observed that there was indeed a large number of players inviting their friends.  But unfortunately, none of their friends were accepting the invites and the goal was no nearer.

Effectively, Impact Mapping is a decision making paradigm for Agile software development companies that focusses on prioritisation based on company goals, not features.  When implemented, it allows for informed business decisions to be made.  The over-arching philosophy is to deliver impacts, not software!

To pull it off effectively you need:

• A really really fast release process (I'm looking at you, Richard :) )
• Metrics that mean something to the business

I can only say so much in a blog post.  I have a million thoughts as to how this can be applied at my workplace and for my own projects and after reading this I'd imagine you would too.  If you would really like to dig deep into the topic, I'd strongly suggest checking out Gojko Adzic's Impact Mapping book or heading to one of his classes when he's in town!

Let me know what you think of all this below!

Cheers,

Shrek