The importance of working with requirements

Two weeks ago (and the week before) I held a couple of sessions of Product Owner training in Sweden. 

As you know, I’m particularly interested in Product Ownership, being such a critical (and often underestimated) activity for the success of an Agile organization.

Anyway, regardless of this, every time I facilitate a PO training, one of the most interesting discussions happens around the subject of requirements. And the reason is that even experienced analysts or system engineers are sometimes not used to work with requirements properly.

The first important concept, which looks straightforward and totally sensible, but happens to be pretty hard to apply, is that a requirement is expression of a need, not a specification to implement.

It is an item in the space of problems: it is a problem to solve, not a function to deliver. 

On the other hand developing SW is just about solving problems, not writing code, right?

For instance, if one says: I want a bridge, is this a requirement? Is it a problem to solve or a solution?

A right conversation would then be: 

- What is the need behind this request?

- I want to cross a river without getting wet.

Eureka! This is a requirement and, as you might guess, this opens up more than one option to find a proper solution. One solution is definitely the bridge, other solutions could be a boat or a raft or even swimming. And you don’t even need to build anything in the latter case.

This is a very important job: understanding the real need behind a customer request. That’s why we don’t say writing requirements or defining requirements, but eliciting requirements, because it is about digging out real problems and helping the customer understanding her real need (or at least making a hypothesis on the real need, which must be validated through a fast feedback loop).

Then you as PO use your brain, your skills, your domain knowledge and the brains in your team to translate the need in business solutions, you can write in forms of User Stories, which is the language you speak with your team.

Requirements are instead the language the Product Owner speaks with customers, but it would be too easy and not profitable downloading the requests on the team as they are. Challenging customer needs is a very crucial activity for a Product Owner to be able to find a solution compatible with business and maximize the Return on Investment. 

I repeat many times to my PO team: your job is not to push your team to do as much as possible – your job is to challenge requirements, so that your team can do as little as possible.

Cutting some scope because it is not needed has an effect that no efficiency program whatsoever can ever beat: effectiveness eats efficiency at breakfast every morning.

Unfortunately I saw too many times the pattern of jumping directly into solution mode as soon as a request arrives and business solutions masked as requirements.

Buddhist masters know that, if you spend enough time in finding and formulating the proper question, the question itself will contain the answer. But how do you feel is the ratio between the time spent on defining the problem and the time spent on the solution in your context?

How to build a big product in a collaborative way – 3

Well in shape into 2013 after the end of the Great MayanCycle, let’s continue the posts thread talking about how to help a Product Owner team work effectively.

We talked already about how to setup the team and how we build the Product Backlog collaboratively.

Let’s touch today the way our team grooms and orders the backlog and I will start telling you the story of a failure.

A “good” failure indeed: one of those you learn something out!

Some months ago, facing the development of customer requests based on the business priority order, the team realized that implementing a new feature would have required moving to the new version of a 3^rd party we integrate in our system.

No big deal: they said!

And everything would have been ok, except for the fact that, after some weeks, we realized that the new version of this product was not actually properly working with our new operating system.

Result, as you can imagine, was: a lot of troubles, blaming games, fights, time wasted and, finally, the decision to roll back to the previous version.

What went wrong then?

The question is that requirements are prioritized according to business value, but Product Backlog is ordered instead, taking into account other factors than simply customer priority.

Otherwise, what would be the added value of a Product Owner?

My 10-years old son would be perfectly able to do tasks strictly following a prioritized list given by someone else.

Of course, I oversimplified the question a bit.

But not too much indeed!

However, out of this failure, we learned how to arrange our backlog better, putting into it competence and brains, not only from Product Owners, but from developers and managers as well.

Now, before ordering our backlog, we take into account 3 parameters mainly:

1. Business value
2. Dependencies
3. Risks

So, before giving the backlog a certain order, we evaluate the business value ranking coming from Product Manager, we consider the Product Anatomy and rate both the technical and non-technical risks we see associated to the requested MMFs. 

So the PO team defines the backlog order, putting high in the list not necessarily the most valuable items, but obviously the ones which the others are dependant from. We give special attention to the riskiest features, many times splitting them and touching them first, so that we can have an early feedback and take actions accordingly.

Actually there’s a fourth parameter which comes into play many times, that is cost: since the goal of a Product Owner is maximizing the Return on Investment, one could choose to anticipate cheaper features, given a certain business value.

That’s the kind of brain we have to put in, to move from prioritized requirements to an ordered backlog.

What else would you suggest to consider in order to get a proper backlog ordering? 

How to build a big product in a collaborative way - 1

What happens when you have a product too big to be built by one team within the timeframe needed by your business?

You might answer: Well, I allocate more teams and then create an organization structure where each team is accountable for their part and with a project staff, headed by an expert project manager, to coordinate everything.

I do not want to judge this answer. However let’s have a look at the Agile principles:

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

What do I get out of this??

Well, first that SW development is a collaborative game by its nature: there’s no complex problem which can be solved by one person in a time which is compatible with modern business needs.

Secondly that self-organization and servant leadership are some how embedded in being Agile.

Furthermore, if you look at Scrum, you will find only 3 roles: Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team.

I'm sorry: no project manager whatsoever.

Beware! I’m not talking about people here: there are plenty of great project managers serving with passion and competence their organization. 

I’m rather referring to roles and their effectiveness in an Agile context, in terms of: What is the probability I might have success in an evolving reality?

Said that, what I would suggest to a Scrum organization is to setup a Product Owner Team.

Yes: a self-organized team formed by all development teams’ Product Owners collaboratively working together. And I’m suggesting that, because I’m currently coaching a PO Team and I would like to tell my experience through this and some other post I’m planning to write.

Of course a team does not make sense if they do not have a product to build: the PO Team’s job is to develop a unique Product Backlog to feed all development teams, so that the following is ensured:

1. the whole organization is focusing at any point in time on the most important items
2. the development teams are as much independent as possible so they can move fast with little need to coordinate each other
3. the overall architecture of the system is preserved 

Like any other Scrum team, a PO Team might better have a Scrum Master or Team coach (it’s just me in our case) and a Product Owner, who is in charge to give a final word on the overall priority in case of conflicts.

To tell you our story I will start from the beginning and that’s the team setup.

In a recent post I described how it is important for a team’s success to set the stage to high performance and that’s just the same crucial if we’re talking about a group of normally quite senior people who need to learn how to collaborate for serving the entire organization at best, instead of only cultivating the silos they felt responsible for.

And we really started from the foundation by writing together our team vision and the ground values we wanted to build our team upon, as you see in the pictures below. After few months I really recognize that this exercise had proved to be tremendously effective.

So we set the first draft of our working agreements.

Since I wanted to introduce the Scrum values in the team in an organic way, I let them decide completely how to organize in the first place and here come our ceremonies:

• Global Backlog grooming once a week
• Global Release planning once a week
• 15-min daily standup everyday
• Review of work done at least by another team member according to our Definition of Ready
• Team retrospective once a month

I will describe each of these ceremonies, make you see our awesome task board and tell you how we build our backlog starting from customer needs in a number of coming posts.

Talk to you soon!