Data Management Services and Shared Services User Story Workshop

Step 1:  We formed four groups of 4-6 people who understood their purpose of their products

Instead of letting the team come up with a vision of their own dream product. As their Agile Coach I proposed to them that they write high level features for the vision of their work which they were familiar with. This way we could get a great start, think of Vision, Epic, Features and User Stories that we could do in our training workshop. I explained what I meant by a feature. Had the team members each come up with a feature and identify the high level requirements on color sticky notes.

Step 2:  Introduce the phrase “EPIC” and tell teams to break features into epics in different color sticky notes

We made a wall map and this helped the teams to paste the features exactly below the epics. When teams established features and epics relationship, I would work with them to make team write high level requirements for each epic. Introduced User Story with an example and its intent. Helped teams understand various formats of User stories. Showed some examples of splitting user stories. Gave few guidelines of dos and don’ts as well as pitfalls and traps when writing user stories.

Step 3:  Start the exercise by asking teams to write high level one liner as requirements for each epic in silence

Each person takes the same colored post-it and silently writes down one user story per post-it. Once everyone had finished writing their post-its, I had each person read their post-its aloud. If anyone had duplicates, we consolidated and this helped find dependencies among the teams working together.

They came up with their team names which were Warehouse Warriors, VLM Vendors Love Me and the Sentinel!