I follow a couple of Scrum and Agile related user groups. Mainly I’m looking for the problems that people are asking about and if I have something unique to offer, I will respond.
A couple of days ago an admited first time poster to one of the Scrum groups posted a question that is pretty common. They are new to Scrum and had done very well in the first 3 months and had seen a significan improvment in productivity.
They were working from a single product backlog with 6 developers on the team. Then they got two additional “side projects” that have to be completed in 10 weeks. He asks how to allocate the team and organize the sprints. Like I said, nothing new here!
He askes if he should break the team up into three small teams or combine the three backlogs and work on the items through the priorities of the combined backlog.
As I read this, I thought to myself ”this guy is thinking about the right stuff”. Depending on the relative priority between the three projects either of his suggestions would have been fine and he notes that to split up the working team would not be a good thing. His instincts were very good.
Then this morning I read a reply from one of the leaders in the community. I won’t flame that person here, because I like and respect them, but I have to admit, I think they are leading this poor guy astray!
Their suggestion was to keep the teams together and rotate though the projects on an iteration by iteration cycle. Like this:
Iteration 1: project 1
Iteration 2: project 2
Iteration 3: project 3
Iteration 4: project 1
Iteration 5: project 2
They went on to say that he could not finish all three projects if they take more than a couple of iterations each, but at least they would know NOW that nothing will be delivered in 10 weeks.
This is so wrong! What is the priority between the projects? There MUST be one that is most important. Working on three projects at once probably means three late projects and no business value is delivered until much later.
Pick the most important project and deliver the smallest set of stories that deliver business value. Then go on to the next and then the next.
The delivery of business value early is what should drive the prioritization of work in any team. No team ever has enough people to do everything that the business can think of. Rather than delaying everything, concentrate on what is most important and deliver that as quickly as you can.
Portfolio management should be about business value delivery, not spreading the work out and keeping stakeholders at bay.
http://www.slideshare.net/rodclaar/business-value-driven-portfolio-management
