People ask us all the time “What are the must use fields that every team should use?” While this is the ultimate “It Depends” answer, I have found that setting a few key guardrails across the entire project team enterprise will give you the best possible chance for decision making, accelerating delivery, and ensuring alignment from the Board Room to the TeamRoom™.
Here are the seven things that help any companies product backlog become a strategic alignment machine.
- REAL RELEASES – Every backlog item must be linked to a Project Asset (e.g. Release). Why not make the release meaningful, and consistent? It’s very easy to see when the Quick Status Check story will be delivered and when if the release is named “11.30.15 – Release 1.0”. In my Scrum Master world, no story is committed to production without being tied in the Org Level hierarchy to a date-based release. Try to keep your project levels as lean a possible.
- PORTFOLIO ITEM – All backlog items should roll-up to an item in the company’s portfolio. That is the best way to provide the visibility and transparency leaders need to help make better decisions and to be able to support the teams overall.
- SIZE – Point estimates provide you a relative ranking of the size of your backlog and are one measure of the potential for delivery of a sprint, release, feature.
- TEAM – Align the work to the team, it’s the agile way. Assigning the work to a team is even more important to me than an owner. The Team will take it from here…
- DEPENDENCIES – Establish the upstream and downstream dependencies to be able to track and manage any potential problems, and to help notify other teams of things you might be putting in their way.
- BLOCKERS – Is the story in trouble? Blockers are the main way to truly know that. Be transparent and use blockers to do your dirty work.
- CONVERSATIONS – Document all conversations associated to that backlog item using meaningful and descriptive conversations.
When every team in your enterprise follows these seven rules, your Portfolio, Program and Team level reporting has the consistency and predictably you need to compete with any company in the world.
