Sam is a strong product owner with clear focus on customer priorities. He interacts with customer and user groups regularly and is committed to adding value to them. He drives the priorities for three different scrum teams and demands high standards from the teams in terms of output and quality. He often finds that teams consistently deliver short of what is planned for in a sprint – only 40-50% of planned stories get completed.
In the meantime, John, Engineering unit head, is receiving complaints from architects and central quality functions that their priorities are not being completed and team is only trying to please the product owner.
John is puzzled by complaints from all these groups. He is also under pressure from enterprise technology group to refresh some of the legacy technologies used by his unit. From his skip level meetings, he has learnt that the scrum teams are working hard and have sought his approval for allocating half-a-day per week for learning new things.
What would be your guidance to John to transform this situation to one where value is being delivered and the stakeholders are happy?
Suggested Solution
- Help John realize that he cannot keep all internal stakeholders happy all the time. His priority needs to be to keep value flowing to his customers continuously.
- He needs to help the PO realise that sustaining flow of value is not just about meeting the immediate needs of the customer. A product needs to be continuously shaped to deliver future needs; risks that could disrupt customer operations should be minimized along the way. Demand from technology group, architects and central quality functions fall in this category – these can reduce risks, enable faster delivery in the future and create the platform for innovations.
- John could set up a collaborative process that would enable periodic conversations among the stakeholders to resolve the priorities and force rank the backlog items for each scrum team to work on. He should expect the Product Owner to play the role of moderating these conversations and take a balanced view to sustain the flow of value.
4 Responses
Hi Shiv, I can relate to this, it is a real different world.
I was invited a few times to address students appearing for CET exams as an industry person and found it challenging to connect with them. I was able to connect somewhat as one of their concern was what if they do not get into a good college, which I was able to address by sharing real life examples.
Thanks Vasu. College “brand” no doubt helps early on in work life – corporate doors open more easily. But down the line, it is people’s motivation and track record that helps build careers. I am sure we have all seen examples affirming this. I have stressed with the mentees that I work with. An aside, the mentorship program I am involved in spans 4-5 months and so, I have had time to work on the “connect”! Yes – takes time and effort.
Hi Shiv – very well written – thanks for the write-up.
Many years ago I was a volunteer mentor for a couple of youth as part of Dream A Dream’s life skills mentoring program. This was in person mentoring where the mentee and I would meet periodically (usually on a weekend) and discuss general topics. There was no prescribed structure though all mentors did go thru a few hours of in person training. Based on that experience I can corroborate that it takes time for the mentee to open up, especially in that case given their lack of confidence in expressing in English which was the recommended language for communication. Switching to Tamil (in one case where the mentee was from Tamil Nadu) helped.
Can also relate well to your point on swings in mood and engagement level of the mentee and the need for mentor to shift gears accordingly.
I am sure the mentees are benefiting a lot from your vast and varied experience – hope you will come back to mentor more such students after you complete the current mentorships and possibly take a break!
Thank you, Bhasker!