One of the main jobs of a Scrum Master is to support the Product Owner (PO) in their Refinement or grooming of the Product Backlog. With that said, this post gives a sample concept for managing a Product Backlog for a Metric or Business Intelligence Team. In this post, the ideas start out as Large Groups of Features or Metrics and then are groomed or Refined with whiteboarding exercises and the refined further in collaboration with the team to document the tasks needed to complete each story. This way the stories are ready to be worked in the Sprint they are selected for.
As a personal note, I always visioned each final graphic as its own story that could be assembled, if desired, into a large grouping of stories or graphics (Features). In essence, I always strove to have each graphic to have its own business value. Sometimes the Story took on multiple display formats for the same information.
The photo below is of a Product Grooming or Refinement Board. The areas starting from left to right are:
- Far left. Just initial Features with one line titles and limited information;
- Middle. Features with Stories identified that are needed to complete the feature. This block starts filling up about two Sprints ahead of time. Usually results in whiteboard activity.
- Far Right. This block is basically the Sprint Backlog for the next Sprint, where Sprint 1 would be the current Sprint and has its own Sprint Board. Each User Story has Task stickies attached to them. They are all ready to go, with maybe some final planning at the Sprint Planning Session held at the beginning of the Sprint.
So it can easily be seen that the Product Owners job is actually pretty involved and is a full time job.
For one of my teams, we had a pretty detailed Refinement Process that was developed through a series of Sprint Retrospectives. As the Scrum Team and Product Owner evolved, so did the process to get to where the Scrum Team had the information it needed to write code.
I have also seen this flow process easily recreated into Kanban boards for the PO and Scrum Teams to manage together. I still love the visual on the wall. This way everyone sees it without the need to look at a computer screen. As the Scrum Master it was my job to ensure the wall and the Sprint Management computer application were in sync as much as possible. It is also a Great visual for higher level management as they walk around the offices. It gives them an opportunity to ask the PO or Team questions if they like.
