Tag: Control Chart

In my earlier post, we discussed using planning boards to improve your backlog planning and eventually to improve your planning flow. Main project workflow remained same.

Note: People landing on this post directly, please read earlier post to get context of the problem.

This team was using 2 week sprint model for execution. Often stories got completed(tested), but left on the scrum board UAT pending. All real users were on-field consultants, hence not easily available for UAT. This reduced team throughput(velocity). Team decided to change their approach and modify their definition-of-done. They decided to have a done column before UAT. Post demos relevant stories were moved to done. In-fact they did multiple demos to product owner all through out the sprint as stories got completed. They configured their execution scrum board as shown below.

In our earlier post – Improve sprint throughput we had discussed about how important it is to have stories ready for play before team picks it as part of the sprint. In short, if half-cooked stories are pushed to sprints for execution, then team will spend lot of time analysing, re-working and this eventually reduces team throughput. To address this challenge, few of my teams thought of creating a separate planning board in Jira to track planning readiness. This board was used by PO primarily to keep a tab on the backlog and also by team members during backlog grooming session.

Team was using Atlasssian Jira, I will show here how we modified the workflow and boards within Jira. Some of the issues teams had faced with the backlog not being ready were:

Insufficient scenario analysis in user stories
Lack of functional and technical impact analysis
Not much details/mocks within the story
Team doing sizing estimate during sprint planning – this was the first time team was seeing those stories and hence made sprint planning long and inefficient

Hence a workflow was designed to address above issues. Take a look at the workflow below(pasting it from Jira).

Streamline Your UAT and DevOps – Kanban Boards

Use Planning Board for Product Backlog Grooming