Creating Shared Understanding with Cards
, Artem Marchenko
In the fable of the blind men and the elephant, each of the blind men touches one part of the elephant (e.g. side, tusk, tail) and develops an incorrect perception of the elephant as a whole. This fable provides an excellent analogy of the customer community; each person and/or department represented in the community will have a different perspective of the problem and/or solution. In this session you will learn (and practice!) how index cards can be used to create shared understanding when defining stories and planning releases.
This session is primarily aimed at Agile 2008 attendees who are new to agile, and/or using cards to create shared understanding when working with stakeholders/teams. It covers the following:
Why Shared Understanding? (10 minutes). During this part of the session we will introduce the sorts of situations typically encountered where people have different perspectives and often leave a requirements / planning session thinking they are all agreed, when in fact, they leave with different understandings about what was agreed.
Introducing Cards (40 mins). An exercise to introduce a card based technique that can help to reduce this issue. The exercise is non-software so everyone can be involved and participate. We ask participants to work in pairs, and first try the exercise without cards and then try it again using cards. Time to reflect on the use of the techniques is also built into this section.
Using cards to prioritize (10 mins). Again, in small groups, we set-up an exercise in prioritizing with cards, so that attendees get a sense of the different uses the card technique opens up for them.
Using cards to create models (25 mins). Continue exploring the uses of cards to create models using cards, and how that impacts the quality of the model and the shared understanding gained by the different participants in the modeling exercise.
How can you use cards tomorrow? (5 minutes). A summary of what has been covered and how attendees could use this technique on their projects tomorrow.
Further information concerning the exercises is included in the sample slides attachment.