Product Backlog – Page 3

March 11, 2019March 11, 2019

Four Steps to Keep Your Product Backlog Small and Manageable

You should always strive to keep your product backlog small and manageable. With too many items on the product backlog, three problems arise:

First, it is harder to work with an excessively large product backlog. Time will be lost looking for items. (“I know it’s in here somewhere.”) Prioritizing the backlog will take longer. Duplicate items will appear as it will be easier to add an item “just in case” rather than be sure it’s not already listed.

Second, the development team barely notices any progress they make. A team that finishes 10 of 50 product backlog items can sense that they’ve made progress. A team that finishes the same 10 but out of 1,000 items will not feel the same sense of accomplishment. They will begin to wonder if it would matter if they had only gotten 9 done instead.

Delete Things You’ll Never Do
Keep Items You Aren’t Ready for Off the Product Backlog
Periodically Review the Product Backlog
Don’t Add Things Unless You Plan to Do Them Fairly Soon

Read the complete article there: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/four-steps-to-keep-your-product-backlog-small-and-manageable

February 19, 2019February 19, 2019

Working with Stakeholders Who Won’t Take No for an Answer

Sign up to receive weekly tips like the one below from Mike Cohn to Help You Succeed with Agile here: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/email-tips

Do your stakeholders have a hard time accepting a “no” from the team? Or put another way, does your team have a hard time telling the stakeholders that what they want is impossible? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, you are not alone.

I’ve found two techniques useful in communicating a “no” so that stakeholders listen and understand.

First, the team should establish a track record of planning projects accurately and meeting most commitments.

You don’t need to be perfect, but if a team meets most of its commitments, the business is more likely to listen when the team says something is impossible.

Second, when telling a stakeholder that a proposed date cannot be achieved, offer alternatives. For example,

By what date could the functionality be delivered?
Are there especially challenging requirements that could be relaxed to meet the deadline?
What could be done to make the date feasible? More people? Stop using the team for second-level support?

Stakeholders often want more than can be delivered by some date. This shouldn’t be the team’s problem alone.

Wanting more than can be delivered must be viewed as a shared problem. A solution can only be found by the business and team working together.

When stakeholders trust the team’s commitment and work together with team members to find solutions, they all succeed with agile.

February 11, 2019February 11, 2019

Patterns for Splitting User Stories

Good user stories follow Bill Wake’s INVEST model. They’re Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. The small requirement drives us to split large stories. But the stories after splitting still have to follow the model.

Read the complete article here: https://agileforall.com/patterns-for-splitting-user-stories/

February 5, 2019February 5, 2019

The Product Management @Scale game: How can Product Owners scale their role?

Now that many organisations are scaling their agile process one way or the other, Product Owners are faced with the challenge of scaling their already busy role. Kai Stevens created The agile product management @scale game that helps Product Owners identify how to focus on the essential product management activities while making sure that other product management activities will be handed over to other members of their team.

Read about it here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/the-product-management-scale-game-a-simple-way-to-figure-out-what-a-product-owner-should-do-cc143cb85ecd

October 18, 2018December 5, 2018

The Liberators build their website

The Liberators build their new website with a Scrum Team within a week. In these posts and videos, they share what they’ve learned about flow and releasing more often – with examples that are as real-life as imaginable 🙂

Read the complete articles here:

https://medium.com/the-liberators/building-theliberators-com-integrate-and-release-often-de3b13ae313f

https://medium.com/the-liberators/how-we-built-theliberators-com-incrementally-93d5095db4ab