In recent times, I got the opportunity to apply the Impact Mapping technique designed by Gojko Adzic to the area of DevOps within our embedded software team. I knew about the technique a while back when Gojko made his appearance in Auckland as part of the Agile Auckland meetup almost 3 years ago.

I was looking for a way to express the vision and purpose of the team, while creating a strong and obvious link to the stories we will be doing everyday. Impact Mapping seemed to fit just that.

You can read up on the details in his book Impact Mapping. Here are the things I found particularly valuable after applying this technique.

Identify Who You’ll Make An Impact On?

One of the core focus of Impact Mapping is identifying the actors (who) and what of their behaviours will help us towards our goal.

The discussion that came out of this was extremely valuable. It links what we’re doing back to real people and how they’ll be impacted by us. Often in software development, we focus a lot on features and on the technical level, but miss out designing for the actual change we’re trying to introduce to the world.

Currently we’ve mapped this out within the team of developers, because developers are the main users of DevOps related features. I think there’s huge value in involving people that closer contact with customers (e.g. sales and marketing people).

Structure for Measurements

Once you have a clear idea on what behaviour you want to make an impact on, the measurement becomes quite obvious. It helps to ask “will this measurement tell me whether is happening”.

In the real world, there’ll be multiple measurements to take into account. Impact Mapping allows you to specify all of those goals, and gives you the flexibility to negotiate between them.

In the book, the example illustrates a game dev company looking to increase their number of players while reducing their operation costs. For the next milestone, it may be OK to have a slight increase in cost if we can greatly increase the number of players.

This List Continues…

That’s it for now. I’ll update this with more insights and learnings when we use the technique a bit more, we’re only at the very beginning of learning about this.

Learn with me by commenting about your experiences below!