Hey all,
I really don’t know waht to do here :
I have 4 POs putting work into a single backlog for our large scrum team. They want to keep the team as 1 but break it out into multiple workstreams.
I see tons of issues with this but they are ALL for it. What do I do here?! Leadership says it’s a team decision, and also they will not break it out into separate scrum teams because they’re not hiring additional SM resources at this time. What are our options as a team in this situation?
I think experiments are a good thing We want teams to experiment with ways of working – that’s basically how we uncover new stuff and challenge dogma.
It’s also how we break the mould of opinion-based win-lose debates on issues and HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinions) carry all the weight, and shift towards evidence-based win-win dialogues.
That said, when we experiment it needs to be based on empiricism; as W Edwards Deming said, we don’t collect data for “museum purposes” – we do it to guide business improvement.
It’s okay to challenge conventional wisdom on things, but do so on an evidence basis:
Key questions become:
What is the hypothesis we are testing?
What does success look like?
What does failure look like?
What will we measure?
How much data do we need to test the hypothesis?
This starts to get into how you want to measure performance as a team; there’s things like the DORA metrics, Kanban metrics and so on, but there’s also how your collective group of product owners are choosing to measure value, story-by-story or Sprint-by-Sprint.
That’s a whole different can of worms, but if they cannot define how they are measuring value delivered, then no-one can tell if this is helping or hindering your business…