Affinity Diagram: Steps, Example & PMP Use [2026]

A requirements workshop is a success when everyone talks, and a problem the next morning when the project manager faces three hundred sticky notes. Somewhere in that wall of paper are the real needs of the project, mixed with duplicates, side remarks, and one note that simply says "faster." An affinity diagram is the tool that turns that wall into a handful of clear themes. This guide explains what an affinity diagram is, how to create one, and how it appears on the PMP® and CAPM® exams.

What is an affinity diagram?

An affinity diagram is a tool that organizes a large number of ideas, observations, or facts into groups of related items, so a team can review and analyze them. Each idea is written on its own note, the notes are clustered by natural similarity, and each cluster is given a name that describes its theme.

The PMBOK® Guide includes the affinity diagram among its tools and techniques. The tool is built for volume, so it earns its place when there are too many ideas to discuss one by one, typically dozens or hundreds of items from a workshop, a survey, or a set of interviews.

What makes the affinity diagram different from simple sorting is the direction of the work. In simple sorting, the categories exist first and the items are filed into them. In an affinity diagram, the items come first, and the categories emerge from them. As a result, the team discovers themes it did not expect, instead of confirming the categories it brought into the room.

Affinity diagram, affinity map, and the KJ method

Affinity mapping is the activity of building an affinity diagram, and an affinity map is another name for the finished diagram. The KJ method is the original name of the technique, after Jiro Kawakita, the Japanese anthropologist who developed it in the 1960s to organize field research data.

In practice, the three terms describe one tool. User experience (UX) teams tend to say "affinity mapping," quality professionals tend to say "affinity diagram," and older management literature uses "KJ method." Note that the tool also belongs to the classic seven management and planning tools used in quality management, which is why it appears in quality as well as in business analysis and design.

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When to use an affinity diagram

Use an affinity diagram when a team has a large number of ideas or facts that are hard to discuss individually, and when the right categories are not obvious in advance. It is especially useful after brainstorming, workshops, interviews, surveys, and retrospectives.

Typical situations include the following:

• After a requirements workshop. Stakeholders produce many needs in their own words, often overlapping.
• During risk identification. A brainstorming session produces a long list of risks that need grouping by source.
• In lessons learned reviews. Many observations need to be consolidated into a few improvements.
• In quality analysis. Possible causes of a defect need to be grouped before deeper analysis.
• In customer research. Interview notes or survey comments need to be turned into themes.

Note that an affinity diagram is not the right tool for a handful of items, which a team can simply discuss. It is also less suited to problems whose structure is already known, such as tracing a single defect to its causes, where a cause-and-effect diagram fits better. It is also not a prioritization tool by itself. It organizes ideas so that prioritization can happen next.

How to create an affinity diagram

An affinity diagram can be created in five steps, on a wall with sticky notes or on a digital whiteboard. The process usually takes 30 to 90 minutes, depending on the number of ideas.

1. Capture one idea per note. Write every idea, observation, or fact on its own note, in a short phrase. One note should carry exactly one idea, so it can move freely.
2. Display all the notes. Put every note where the whole group can see it, in no particular order.
3. Group the notes in silence. Participants move notes next to related notes without discussion. Silent grouping prevents the most senior or loudest person from deciding the structure. A note that fits two groups can be duplicated.
4. Name each group. Once the groups stabilize, the team discusses each one and writes a header that states its theme, such as "Login and account access."
5. Review and refine. Merge groups that overlap, split groups that are too broad, and check that every note sits in a group that makes sense.

A few practical guidelines make the session work better. Keep each group to about five to eight participants, and split larger groups into parallel tables whose results are combined afterward. Timebox each step, such as ten minutes for writing and fifteen minutes for silent grouping, so the session keeps moving. In remote sessions, a shared digital whiteboard works well, provided every participant can move notes at the same time. Finally, include people with different perspectives, because the most useful themes often appear where two departments describe the same problem in different words.

Consider a project manager, Laura Mendes, running a lessons learned session at the end of a warehouse automation project. Her team writes 85 observations in ten minutes. After ten minutes of silent grouping, six clusters appear, and the team names them, from "Vendor handoffs" to "Testing environments." The discussion that follows covers six themes instead of 85 separate comments.

Affinity diagram example

The example below comes from a requirements workshop for a hospital patient portal. Stakeholders from three departments wrote 60 needs on notes. After silent grouping, the notes formed four themes. The table shows the themes and a few of the notes in each.

Notice what the grouping revealed. The billing department expected its needs to dominate, but the largest group by far was test results. The team had not planned a requirements theme for accessibility at all, and it emerged from notes written by all three departments. This example shows why the groups should come from the content rather than from categories decided in advance.

Affinity diagram in project management

In project management, the affinity diagram is mainly used to organize requirements, risks, and lessons learned. It turns the raw output of group sessions into structured inputs that the project can document, prioritize, and act on.

Its most common uses are the following:

• Requirements. After stakeholders are interviewed or a workshop is held, an affinity diagram groups the needs into themes, which then feed the requirements documentation and the requirements gathering work that defines the scope.
• Risks. A risk brainstorming session can produce dozens of risks. Grouping them by source (such as technical, vendor, or regulatory) shows where the project is most exposed.
• Lessons learned. Grouping observations shows which problems recur across a project, rather than listing them one at a time.
• Stakeholder concerns. Grouping feedback from many stakeholders shows which concerns are widely shared and which belong to a single group.

To illustrate the risk use, consider a project manager, David Okafor, preparing a data-center relocation. His team brainstorms 70 risks in twenty minutes. After grouping, 31 of them fall under a single theme, "Vendor dependencies," while the theme the team had worried about most, "Hardware damage in transit," holds only eight. The grouping changes where the team spends its risk-response effort, and the 70 individual risks then move into the risk register under their themes.

The affinity diagram also works well with other scope tools. The themes it reveals can be prioritized with the MoSCoW method, and any theme involving external systems can be checked against a context diagram.

Affinity diagram as a quality tool

The affinity diagram is also a recognized quality tool. It is one of the seven management and planning tools, and the PMBOK® Guide includes it for quality work as well. There, a team uses it to sort the possible causes of a problem into groups and see which area needs attention first.

In a quality setting, the team brainstorms every possible cause of a problem, such as late deliveries or a rising defect rate, and then groups the causes. For example, a team analyzing customer complaints might find that most possible causes cluster around supplier materials, while only a few relate to assembly. That grouping directs the deeper analysis that follows, such as a cause-and-effect review of the largest cluster.

Affinity diagram template

An affinity diagram needs only a simple template, on paper or in any digital whiteboard tool. The following layout works for most sessions.

• Header. The session's question, such as "What did we learn from this project?"
• Unsorted area. A space where all new notes are placed first.
• Group columns. Empty columns where clusters form, each with a blank header card for the theme name.
• Parking lot. A place for notes that do not fit any group yet.
• Owner and date. So the team knows which version is current.

Keep the template plain. Note that predefined group names defeat the purpose, so the group headers stay blank until the team has grouped the notes.

What to do after an affinity diagram

After an affinity diagram is complete, the team prioritizes the groups and turns them into actions or documents. An affinity diagram is a starting point, so its value comes from what the team does next.

Common next steps include voting on the most important groups (for example, with dot voting), writing each group as a requirement, risk, or improvement action, and assigning an owner to each. On a requirements effort, the grouped needs move into the requirements documentation. On a risk effort, each group's risks move into the risk register. In both cases, record the diagram itself, since it shows how the conclusions were reached.

How to use AI for affinity diagrams

AI tools can help with affinity diagrams by suggesting groups for a long list of notes, proposing names for each group, or spotting duplicate ideas. This is useful when a session produced hundreds of notes or when a team works remotely and needs a first draft quickly.

Treat the AI output as a draft. An AI tool can group notes by word similarity, but it does not know which ideas truly belong together in the project's context, and the value of affinity grouping comes partly from the team's discussion. In addition, check what data the notes contain before pasting them into a public AI tool, since requirements and interview notes may include confidential information. Our guide to AI in project management explains how to review AI output and protect project data.

Affinity Diagrams on the PMP® and CAPM® Exams

In the PMP® exam, the affinity diagram appears in scenarios about requirements, risks, and quality, such as a team that has collected many ideas and needs to make sense of them. If a question describes a large set of unsorted input, consider whether the right next step is to organize it before prioritizing or documenting it. Note that the strongest answers let the groups emerge from the participants and their content, while a common distractor jumps straight to prioritization or forces the ideas into categories decided in advance.

The CAPM® exam devotes 27% of its questions to business analysis, where elicitation tools such as the affinity diagram belong. CAPM scenarios are also situational, with no definition questions, and the scenarios are simply shorter. Our best-selling PMP Complete Study Guide, the most complete study guide on the market, covers these tools the way the exam tests them, and our CAPM Complete Study Guide does the same for entry-level candidates.

PMP Practice Question: Affinity Diagram

A project manager is leading a hybrid project to build a patient portal for a regional hospital. Three requirements workshops with the nursing, billing, and records departments produced 240 sticky notes of stakeholder needs. Each department used its own terms for similar needs, and the department heads disagree about which needs matter most. The sponsor wants the release scope agreed within three weeks.

What should the project manager do next?

a) Facilitate a session with the key stakeholders to draw a context diagram of the portal, its external systems, and the information flowing between them.

b) Ask the business analyst to sort the 240 notes into the categories of the organization's standard requirements template, and circulate the result for comments.

c) Facilitate a session in which the workshop participants group the notes in silence into clusters that emerge from the content, and then name each cluster together.

d) Ask each department head to classify every note as must-have, should-have, could-have, or won't-have so that the release scope can be set.

Correct answer: C.

Rationale: The decisive fact is that each department used its own terms for similar needs, while the department heads disagree about priorities. The 240 notes therefore contain hidden duplicates, and no shared vocabulary exists yet. Option c) builds that shared understanding, because the people who wrote the notes group them together and agree on the names, so the same need described three ways ends up in one cluster. Option b) is tempting because it also groups the notes. However, predefined template categories impose the organization's structure on the content, and a business analyst sorting alone cannot reconcile three departments' terminology or win their agreement. Option d) is the correct move from a prioritization question, but here it comes too early. Prioritizing 240 ungrouped notes asks the disputing department heads to rank duplicates separately, which deepens the conflict. Option a) borrows the correct answer from a context diagram question, where the problem was an unclear system boundary. Here the problem is organizing a large set of needs, which a context diagram does not address. PMI's way is to understand and organize the input before prioritizing it. For full-length, realistic, scenario-based practice with detailed explanations, built to train the PMI® mindset, take our PMP practice exams or, at the entry level, our CAPM practice exams.

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