Keywords: affinity diagram
The affinity diagram is a business tool used to organize ideas and data. It is one of the Seven Management and Planning Tools.
The tool is commonly used within project management and allows large numbers of ideas stemming from brainstorming to be sorted into groups, based on their natural relationships, for review and analysis. It is also frequently used in contextual inquiry as a way to organize notes and insights from field interviews. It can also be used for organizing other freeform comments, such as open-ended survey responses, support call logs, or other qualitative data.
People have been grouping data into groups based on natural relationships for thousands of years; however the term affinity diagram was devised by Jiro Kawakita in the 1960s and is sometimes referred to as the KJ Method.
