Raj has been designated as product owner for the e-commerce website that the company is building. He was a business analyst and used to writing requirements document in the traditional SDLC [waterfall] model.
This team was following Agile practices and he now needed to write the requirements in the format of stories.
While Raj had read up about stories being byte sized, the items in the product backlog were too detailed with specifications on how a feature should be implemented, like the requirements specs that he was used to creating.
He spent a lot of time in the grooming sessions, much more than planned, in fact. But still, after 6 sprints, the team was not ready to deploy any code to production, as the stories that spilled over multiple sprints, were not completely done.
How can we help Product owner so that team can start producing or moving things to production?
Suggested Solution:
I would start with helping him understand why the organisation is moving to Agile i.e we are looking at making faster delivers to production and his role’s importance in making it happen. He could go for a formal session for product owner and get trained in story writing. Then as a coach, I would help him in writing stories and facilitate backlog grooming session for a couple of times. This would help him get started in the right way.
2 Responses
Velocity of each individual iteration will be a different figure. There are many ways velocity gets impacted. Apart from planned absence (planned leave, training etc.) and holidays, there could be unplanned absences caused by illness, personal emergency etc. which impact velocity. User stories that do not get completed in an iteration get moved to next iteration. This brings down the velocity of the iteration where the story was started and bumps up the velocity of the iteration where it got completed. This being the situation, good practice is to take an average of last five or six iterations as the velocity of the team. Team stability is another factor that impacts velocity. Teams that have higher churn will see higher volatility in velocity. Other factors such as change in technology, adoption of new tools, increase in automation, will also impact velocity either positively or negatively! However, if team is stable and has reached “performing stage” steady rise in average velocity will be seen over a period of time till any of the factors mentioned above comes into play and impacts it.
Thanks Milind, fully agree with your comment.
Finally, irrespective of the increasing trend in velocity, there is improvement for sure. This cannot be missed, if observed. One of the intent of my blog is to encourage this observation, by taking a mildly provocative stand.