Broken business connection w/t absent PO

This blog is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing Agile. 

Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work.


PO(Product Owner) is the bond between the development team and business, PO's unavailability can create a big problem for the development team and the product itself. 

There are some strategies in case the unavailability of PO is temporary(like a medical condition or planned holidays). 

    1) Work with PO so that backlog is well-groomed for few sprints 

    2) Ask for a substitute in case there is an important and urgent need by the team. This could be a peer of the PO

    3) Repriotize the user stories like Engineering technical debts when the PO is not reachable

    4) Involve a larger stakeholder group(to compensate for PO absence) to review and accept user stories

    5) Define additional update reviews with the stakeholder just to make sure nothing gets dropped 


If your PO is continuously un-available due to other responsibilities try these things: 

    1) Work with PO to understand if it is temporary or permanent. Ask if some else can act as a proxy. Proxy PO should have the authority to accept user stories and reprioritize the backlog 

    2) Ask for a replacement, work with PO and leadership team to find a suitable replacement 

    3) If a proper replacement cannot be found recommend to the leadership team cancel the work. If there is no business person to guide the team there may not be a need to develop the product 


Previous post: 

Agile - Let's go back to waterfall

Agile- DSM(Dragged-out standup)

Agile- Everything gets stuck in testing

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DSM( Dragged-out Standup Meeting )

Image
This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile .  Agile is easy on process but many of us underesti mate the difficulty of making it work. DSM = Daily scrum meeting when done the wrong way can bring down the productivity of the entire scrum team and frustrated team members.  Some common reasons for these frustrations:  1) Time - How long is the DSM? anything more than 15 min is not healthy 2) Schedule- Does the scheduled time of DSM change very often?  3) Quality of update - Team member stated that he/she worked on US(UserStory)#1234 and today he will work on US#4567, for other team members it was absolutely no(n)sense  4) Tone of the DSM - Is this meeting a status meeting for SM/PO? 5) Many side conversations leading to "can you pls repeat"  6) Team members give the same/similar update every day 7) Team members share too many details 8) Team members perception of DSM...
Read more

Let's go back to waterfall

Image
This  blog  is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing  Agile . Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work. There is a  possibility that one or many of the team members can come back to SM(Scrum Master) or to the management suggesting to go back to waterfall. Instead of passing the buck to the management(it is the management that wants us to do Agile) try to have a meaningful conversation with the team to understand why they think agile is not working.  On a lighter note SM can always say OK, let's go back to writing a 100-page spec document and many more meetings to review them 🤣 Some of the most common reasons are:  1) Lack of appropriate training of Agile methodology 2) Lack of hands-on training on tools JIRA, scrum boards, etc.  3) Moving away from comfort zone(the waterfall)  4) Pressure from management to deliver  5) Skillset gap...
Read more