Re: How to handle pressure fron product owners

Hi Satya,


There have been good suggestions to your questions so far. If the PO is so
passionate about the change in that the dev team is not at all working on
anything providing business value, then there should be a team decision to
end the sprint and regroup (aka blow up the sprint). However, that may not
be a satisfactory solution for the dev team as they have already finished
the initial coding of the requested user story functionality. It may be a
good idea to enumerate the potential options for the team and the effects
of those options to facilitate a team decision. The next step is clearly
NOT to simply take the requested changes and move on within the sprint.


To help solve the full problem, past your need for an immediate decision, I
may also question and suggest the following:
1. Was there an initial sprint (typically called Sprint 0) to set up the
backlog?
2. If so, were all features and user stories in the backlog assigned to a
measurable business objective?
3. If not, I'd highly recommend that the PO understand why this project has
been funded, what are the expected business objectives and ensure that ALL
features and user stories are linked to supporting a business objective
(you may have more than one business objective).
4. Are you using some kind of requirements management tool? (eg. BluePrint,
Reqs Mgmt for JIRA, Jama, etc) If not, I would highly recommend using it as
it would facilitate linking your epics, features, and user stories to
business value. The goal of what you want to be doing is delivering FIRST
what is linked to the HIGHEST business value.




I also may recommend 2 books for you PO to help him/her out: (I'm not
personally affiliated with either of these books.)
http://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Product-Ownership-Balancing-Inside


http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Product-Management-Scrum-Addison-Wesley




Let us know what action the team decides to take and how it turns out.




Thanks
Kristin