Many things are taken for granted with Agile. One of those things is that there is a product owner who:
- Is co-located
- Is always available
- Knows everything
- Can make decisions
- Can prioritise
- Knows how to write user stories
- Can see the ‘wood for the trees’ (is comfortable with abstraction)
- Can imagine a future way of working
A person with these qualities does not exist on the project I’m working on at the moment. I doubt anybody’s working on a project with somebody like that; if you are – work hard to get a contract extension because that’s as good as it gets.
Product owners are not requirements engineers, nor do they want to be. If we, as the delivery team, sit back and wait for a prioritised and properly sized set of stories to arrive in time for our planning game, we are going to be frustrated. This is a ‘push’ model; the requirements people push us the stories. What do we do if the stories aren’t coming through? Well, then we have to use a ‘pull’ model to get the stories into the planning game.
The business knows what they want; up to a point. As far as they are concerned, they have told us what they want. It’s not enough for delivery to get on and build it, but it’s certainly a good start. We say ‘where are the requirements?’ They say ‘you know what we want.’ So what’s the problem? The problem is the devil is in the detail.
If we don’t have enough detail, we need to model the scenarios, look at the data, consider the alternatives, come up with our best recommendation of how the system should behave and then present the business with the findings. So, a pull approach to getting stories into the backlog, when the cupboard is looking bare, is you do the modelling and scenario work upfront, then you have a conversation and then you get agreement to feed the sprint.
The sprint is a hungry story monster that needs to be constantly fed with good quality stories. The business can get bogged down in stories, value, priorities, acceptance criteria and release plans. It’s hard. The analysts in the delivery team need to offer the business analysts/product owners a hand – whatever it takes to get the job done.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!