From User-Story-Mapping to Process-Story-Mapping

At the beginning of a project that is more complex than an email or a todo app, we usually have some main sources of information, such as established processes, formal requirements, and stories from users, telling us how they want to use the system. At this point, we have no clue about the design aspects, how many services or applications will be involved, and we don\‘t want to anticipate any of that. How do we get a clear idea of the system and how can we communicate with our shareholders?

We have tried to bring some tools together and call it Process Story Mapping.

User story mapping usually brings visual clarity to the confusing list of requirements. Instead of keeping your user stories as a flat list, story mapping allows you to organize user stories in a meaningful way. You understand the functionality of the system, detect holes in your backlog and effectively plan holistic releases that deliver value to users and business.

According to Jeff Patton activities are big stories. These activities are too big to schedule in the backlog, so they are broken down into smaller user tasks. A user task is what users do to accomplish their goal. It should be small enough to implement it in one iteration.

The typical order in which the user uses the system is from left to right, at least in the western world.

The order from top to bottom corresponds to the priority of the user tasks. High priority at the top and low priority at the bottom.

To create useful releases for each iteration, you can slice the user tasks along the horizontal axis and select the right bundle of functions with a variable depth for each activity.

The typical order in which the user executes the task in the story map seems like a linear business process in the form of a chain or pipeline, let\‘s call it a process pipeline, executed from left to right. Typically, a user input triggers a process, which is not fully transparent to the user. The result at the end of the process is again visible to the user. If we imagine a very simplified example of a payment process in an online store, the user\‘s story might look like this: \“As a customer, I would like to pay with my credit card so that I can be more flexible managing my financial situation.\” This triggers the entire checkout process, which includes the request to the higher-level provider, converting the card into an order, and displaying the result to the user.

A purely agile approach is only possible if the requirements constantly flow to the project team through feedback from the business users and the product can be continuously improved and refined. Since in most projects something new is created and the customer has specific ideas about the finished product, in practice the requirement analysis and the design are made and accepted together with the customer. Hybrid project management combines different project management methods or individual elements of different approaches. Often, hybrid project management is a combination of classical and agile approaches. In the first phase, an MVP can be defined using a classic approach through analysis and design which is then developed in an agile manner.

Using hybrid projects to manage the development of more complex systems, sometimes

you need to analyze and model an (existing) business process in advance. In this case, to me, the business process model activities are similar to the user activities of the user story mapping.

Therefore, in our current project we mapped the user tasks and user activities to process activities and called this: Process Story Mapping. We can identify holes and shortcomings, decide how deep to implement each process step by covering the whole process and not lose the big picture with relationships between activities.

In the horizontal axis — the columns — of the mapping we list the serialized steps of the process. The process can be serialized using breadth-first search, Depth-first search or similar depending on the context. The vertical axis — the rows — still shows the priority of the user tasks.

For simplicity, user tasks need not be complete user stories but can be written as simple descriptions of ideas, tasks, or formal functional requirements.

Sources

https://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog (visited: 2023-06-14)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-story-mapping (visited: 2023-06-14)

https://ifm-business.de/aktuelles/business-news/hybrides-projektmanagement-definition-und-methoden-von-traditionell-ueber-agil-bis-hybrid.html (visited: 2023-06-14)