Team Maturity
There are common ways on how the Product Owner can manage the product backlog and negotiate with stakeholders in the context of team availability and capability, which are velocity planning and capacity planning. While the two sorts mentioned are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the Product Owner should also, in fact, reinforce his or her planning with the consistency and maturity of the team in strategizing accordingly. In velocity planning and assuming a velocity trend has been established by the development team, the Product Owner will be able to predict how much scope or product backlog items can be prepared on the next sprint backlog in terms of estimated story points.
This is effective as long as the velocity is stable across sprints and with a consistent Sprint goal focusing on value delivery. Capacity planning will take into consideration development work disruptions – planned leaves, the tendency for context switching, member availability, meetings or any AFK (away from keyword) non-relevant activities. Stories to be worked upon are planned by man-days and will fill-up to availability limit of the team.
Guiding Product Owners in Practice
It’s preferably better to employ both to address common uncertainties in those two planning methods, such as the following:
Revolving team members – while ideally this is highly discouraged especially when hiring contractors that only serve a portion of the entire project lifespan or project context-switching team members, such case does happen and can likely compromise the project’s health. Furthermore, the instability of the team composition will yield more overhead to train new-comers to familiarize with the project before being able to deliver value. The large-swing variability of capacity and velocity should be considered and negotiated accordingly with stakeholders.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course:
Course Contents
Section 1: Agile Project Management
Section 2: Using the Agile Manifesto to Deliver Change
Section 3: The 12 Agile Principles
Section 4: The Agile Fundamentals
Section 5: The Declaration of Interdependence
Section 6: Agile Development Frameworks
Section 7: Introduction to Scrum
Section 8: Scrum Projects
Section 9: Scrum Project Roles
Section 10: Meet the Scrum Team
Section 11: Building the Scrum Team
Section 12: Scrum in Projects, Programs & Portfolios
Section 13: How to Manage an Agile Project
Section 14: Leadership Styles
Section 15: The Agile Project Life-cycle
Section 16: Business Justification with Agile
Section 17: Calculating the Benefits With Agile
Section 18: Quality in Agile
Section 19: Acceptance Criteria and the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 20: Quality Management in Scrum
Section 21: Change in Scrum
Section 22: Integrating Change in Scrum
Section 23: Managing Change in Scrum
Section 24: Risk in Scrum
Section 25: Risk Assessment Techniques
Section 26: Initiating an Agile Project
Section 27: Forming the Scrum Team
Section 28: Epics and Personas
Section 29: Creating the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 30: Conduct Release Planning
Section 31: The Project Business Case
Section 32: Planning in Scrum
Section 33: Scrum Boards
Section 34: Sprint Planning
Section 35: User Stories
Section 36: User Stories and Tasks
Section 37: The Sprint Backlog
Section 38: Implementation of Scrum
Section 39: The Daily Scrum
Section 40: The Product Backlog
Section 41: Scrum Charts
Section 42: Review and Retrospective
Section 43: Scrum of Scrums
Section 44: Validating a Sprint
Section 45: Retrospective Sprint
Section 46: Releasing the Product
Section 47: Project Retrospective
Section 48: The Communication Plan
Section 49: Formal Business Sign-off
Section 50: Scaling Scrum
Section 51: Stakeholders
Section 52: Programs and Portfolios