The Agile Professor - Creating an Agile Learning Environment for Classrooms and Schools

I asked David if he would post this piece - instead he gave me permission to do so. I thought it was a very creative piece of work.

Read and enjoy:

” I’m no expert, but I have an idea which might help other Scrum teams who are struggling with a giant backlog.” -David Sabine
Background Information:

• A needs assessment was performed at our College about 20 months ago (prior to my arrival in this job) and the consultant identified 120 deliverables which would comprise a full-featured “Web Portal” and provide all our stakeholders with the functionality they desire. These deliverables/ideas vary in scope and purpose — like ‘online enrolment’ to ‘Podcast/RSS feeds’ to ‘discussion forums’ to ‘online tuition payment’ — some are projects in and of themselves but others can be easily converted into “user stories” with bite-sized workloads. Hence, we’ve decided to call that needs assessment our “Product Backlog”.
• Our team was formed very recently. And because our team is forming within the confines of a very bureaucratic institution, we’ve appointed a Product Owner (our C.I.O.) and by circumstance he has not had time yet to study and prioritize those 120 items in our Product Backlog. He’s the person who has both the expertise and authority to keep our team focused but his responsibilities at the College go way beyond our little team; so I expect that we should help him maintain the Product Backlog as objectively as we can (if not objectively, then at least collectively).

So, what’s the problem exactly?

Well, according to Scrum’s rules, the Product Owner is supposed to inform the team of each item’s relative “value” (thus ordering the Product Backlog). But to expidite our process (we want to get started!) and to assist our Product Owner, I wondered if I could devise a reasonable method to distill the backlog and make the most valuable items rise out of the murk.

The activity (the solution):

Our team is 3 members + 1 product owner + 1 chicken (let’s call him a “primary stakeholder”). So, with the 5 people in the room I determined to:

1. Have the people line up aside each other - in order by their ‘length of employment at the College’. I knew that this would place my manager (our primary stakeholder) at one end of the line.
2. I handed him a stack of paper — 120 slips of paper with items from the ‘needs assessment’ printed in giant font.
3. I gave these instructions:For each slip of paper:
   1. pick up the paper and read the sentence.
   2. within 12 seconds, consider the statement carefully and answer this single question: “Do I know this task to be ‘impossible’ by this team at this time?” (That might mean technically/financially/politically impossible.)
   3. If ‘yes’ then discard the slip of paper face down and pick up the next.
   4. if ‘no’ or ‘I’m not sure’ then give the paper to the next person (who then performs the exact same instructions).

Some items made it through to the end. Many were discarded. That’s the whole idea.

Simple, right? Well, at the end of this routine we had temporarily eliminated about 80 items from the backlog. I say ‘temporarily’ because those items may still have value at a later stage in the project and we’ll have to revisit them of course.

But there were still too many items on the surface and I felt the we could whittle the pile further yet. I suggested we repeat the activity but alter the question slightly to: “Do I know this task to be ‘utterly trivial’ at this time?” We did and it worked.

In effect (and within only 24 minutes!) we had narrowed our pile from 120 to 12 and had eliminated all items that were either extremely difficult or totally useless. As well, an excellent fringe benefit I think, our primary stakeholder (my manager) has now had 12 seconds to contemplate each and every item in the backlog; until this week I believe he has had some difficulty understanding the gravity of the expectations set upon this team.

Then, with some discussion we were able to order those 12 by their relative “value” and, voila!, we have an effective Product Backlog.

While I may have bent Scrum’s rules a little, I believe that the activity was invaluable. Time will tell.