Although the affinity exercise was supported by the people who attended, the actual execution of the exercise was not as organized as I had hoped.

Affinity Diagram

Lessons Learned:

·         Apparently most of the people who came to the exercise did not read the information in the meeting request, and therefore did not really know what was going on beforehand. I did not learn of this until AFTER the exercise was done (although I would say it became apparent during the exercise). Next time I do one of these exercises I would give a more robust overview of the purpose of the exercise and the tasks at hand before we start.

·         Several of the key architects that were supposed to attend the exercise were not able to attend at the last minute. Management added additional people to attend. About a dozen people ended up attended the exercise. This group was slightly unmanageable, and there was probably too many people at once. Next time I would either invite a smaller group to participate, or split the groups up into teams, and split the tasks into groups. I might create a competitive challenge out of the activity to help get the participants more excited about the exercise.

·         A number of people who attended the exercise did not understand the affinity concept. I feel I should have prepared the team better by giving an overview of this before the exercise started.

·         The groups that were created in the affinity project still needed to be broken down into smaller groups.

·         Engineers organized the tasks in ways that were not expected.

After the affinity exercise I created a mental model of the information that was collected. This process was a little harder than I anticipated. Over-all I believe that the project was a success, and I think creating my first mental model was a great exercise. Now I need to distribute the mental model to development and implement it’s use. Hopefully the development team will see the added value of using this process for future projects.