ProjectMapping
From SPA Wiki
Thanks to all the workshop participants for sharing their wonderful project maps! I have uploaded the photographs during the session 1.
My observations during the workshop were that having everyone work on their own maps for the first part of the exercise meant the workshop was eerily quiet up until the break. Participants paired up to tell their project saga with the aim of developing a key/legend of lessons learned. This was the section of the workshop where most insights occurred (Alistair Cockburn called this "double externalising").
There was some interesting conversation during the break about how this related to the "Emotional Cycle of Change" (as used at Tesco).
Other observations that we captured in the debrief were:
- the maps help to create a team terminology/vocabulary
- some common patterns were spotted across the maps -even though they were of different projects.
- it would be interesting to compare maps across several projects within an organisation to see if there were repeating patterns
- even successful projects can have downward trajectories at some point during their journey
- the exercise started with building a timeline maybe this encourages serial thinking - although some maps did not follow a linear path
- it can be difficult to reflect permenant project features in map form
- it would be interesting to record reasons at decision points and connect them with the lessons learned map key
