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Managing PO work with Scrum: does it need own analysis backlog?

Last post 07:48 pm May 27, 2020 by Dovile Krusinskaite
2 replies
Dovile Krusinskaite
09:16 pm May 25, 2020

Hi, everyone, need some advice. I am heading two separate teams in Business Intelligence and trying to put their work in agile framework.

  • BAs: they first elicit business requirements for specific BI needs and then act as product owners (create user stories). 3 BAs.
  • BI Devs: they create BI solutions as per requirements. 8 people, but with different skill set (ETL, DWH, BI, Viz)

Both teams have HR  team leads. We serve the whole company, so BI needs come from different Business Units. This is what I am planning to do (and this is where I would love some feedback!).

1) I act as PO for BAs and put items in Analysis PB. They act as development team and take my User Stories to the Analysis Sprints. We only have one Analysis backlog for all business units and one sprint.

2) As much as possible, I've aligned the business units, 3 BAs and BI developers into three virtual teams. They all have their own product backlog and sprints. Some people, like data analysts, overlap in some cases. Here BAs act as PO and provide user stories for the dev teams. 

So all in all: 1 combined Analysis Backlog and sprint and 3 Product Backlogs with individual sprints.

It does sound complicated, but I couldn't think of the better way doing it. Another option was not to have Analysis Backlog and sprints (skip the item 1) and just have 3 Product Backlogs. However, running BI in purely agile fashion is rather challenging, as quite a bit of analysis needs to be done upfront: define data needs, source needs, metrics and KPI specifics. Basically - PO needs to perform quite a bit of business analysis before she/he can produce meaningful user stories for PB and answer Dev team's questions. If I leave main analysis as a user story in the product backlog (item 2) - then the dev team wouldn't be able to assess the workload comfortably, also, any delay in analysis, would delay dev work. 

 

How does that sound? Any feedback or suggestions. And in general - any advice on scrum'ed BI - please let me know :) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ian Mitchell
05:43 am May 26, 2020

I am heading two separate teams in Business Intelligence and trying to put their work in agile framework.

How would a team establish empirical process control? How would a team inspect and adapt its progress based on evidence, and thereby maximize product value?

It does sound complicated, but I couldn't think of the better way doing it

What are your thoughts about encouraging team self-organization?

Dovile Krusinskaite
06:43 pm May 27, 2020

I probably have a more fundamental questions - where and how does PO record his/her time. Because it's also part of product delivery and should be accounted. Isn't it?

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