Have you struggled to split user stories into small but valuable chunks? Do you have problems prioritising stories or getting a commitment from business stakeholders on what they want to achieve? Do you have issues deciding when a story is done or how many other stories you really need to achieve a business objective? Are you managing large amounts of stories that are problematic to estimate, prioritise or plan for? If so, join this interactive workshop and bring your product owners and business sponsors to learn how to get the most out of user stories.

This workshop is for people who want to learn several effective ways that industry-leading teams apply to make their user stories much more effective. Come to learn how to ensure that things coming into your work stream are defined well, split to be small enough but valuable, and achieve the big benefits of adaptive planning and that you can expect from great user stories.

• I had the fortunate experience of attending Gojko Adzic’s workshop at Booster 2014 on improving user stories. I must say, that for me it was more like ‘radically rethinking the way you’re doing user stories’, Ørjan Taule
• Clearly loads of insight and value + well worth doing, Rory MacDonald
• Enjoyable, interesting and useful course with engaging teacher, Morven Ramsay
• Engaging, informative and energizing - it’s a must, Rob Malcom
• Thought provoking! Inspired to try and implement the ideas in my team, Gavin Bussey

Key Learning Points

This workshop is based on our books Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories, Impact Mapping and years of experience helping teams deliver better software. After the workshop, you will know how to:

• Fight a huge backlog with 500 crap stories
• Prioritise with multiple competing stakeholders
• Avoid a user story stream of consciousness and create a big picture for prioritisation
• Establish a good reporting structure on outcomes rather than just monitoring velocity and activity
• Get agreement from the whole team and the business sponsors about which user stories are useful and which are just noise
• Enable business sponsors to benefit from flexible scope and avoid water-scrum-fall
• Effectively prioritise based on value
• Avoid pet features
• Run impact mapping sessions
• Split the ‘unsplittable’ stories, and ensure that work items are small but actually still valuable
• Avoid getting stuck in ‘technical stories’
• Run user story mapping sessions

Intended Audience

This is a seminar for a broad audience of anyone involved in iterative (agile/lean/scrum/kanban) delivery with user stories. Business sponsors will learn how to ensure their organisation benefits more from agile team delivery capability, and how to steer product management and delivery better to achieve strategic goals faster. Analysts and Product owners will learn how to link between business sponsors and teams more effectively, how to select and prioritise stories and features to achieve better impacts Developers and testers will learn how to engage with business stakeholders and product owners to get better direction and focus delivery on things that really matter