Affinity Mapping

Affinity Mapping can be done in conjunction with the 2 Min Brainstorm and allows attendees to simply group together and categorise a range of ideas and make sense of the data.

This technique can be useful in Retrospectives for example where a range of improvement ideas may be presented by the team, but now need to make sense of the ideas, grouping them, categorising them and removing overlaps and duplicates.

Tasks

• Grouping the ideas:
  • One by one: If the team are holding their own ideas, then ask if one person would like to share one of their ideas with the team, and if there are any duplicates to group them together in the centre of the table. Ask if another person would like to share another idea and repeat until all of the ideas are grouped in the centre of the table.
  • All at once: If there are a number of ideas in the centre of the table or on a whiteboard / flip chart paper for example, then the ask the team to collectively group them together and form categories of ideas
• Ask the team to then write up the categories of the ideas either on post it notes or by writing on a flip chart paper or similar. Some teams like to draw boundaries around the post-it notes if there are a number of them and we need to make a distinction between categories
• If appropriate, ask the team to refactor the categories into something more meaningful using the ideas as inspiration – this can be useful to use the collective thinking in the team to arrive at a first cut Product Backlog for example, where the ideas have influenced the creation of the Product Backlog Items as a starting point