product owner

Agile Offshore : Business Analyst – Complementing the Role of Product Owner

Let’s take a scenario.

You have a product owner at distributed location but somehow he is not able to provide sufficient time to distributed team. Because of that team doesn’t get enough understanding of user-story.

Does it sound familiar?

Mostly it’s about PO getting involved in too many other things. That results in not having user-stories READY, analysed or communicated properly.

That brings another question related to suitability of people assigned for PO role. Not everybody is good in analysing and writing good user-stories.
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100 Practices to Form Your Dream Scrum Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

Today I would like to share few practices that I have seen working wonders to teams following scrum. Not all the practices are followed by all the scrum teams. But by and large you see highly successful teams has many of them from this list.

Below is a mind map which you can download to see in it a bigger view or click zoom after you click on the image to see larger view.

I would like to hear from all of you regarding what else you would like to add to this list or modify any of them. Depending upon your feedback I will update this diagram and share updated version of this for everyone to use.

On purpose, I have not included XP practices just to keep focus only on Scrum.

What practices you would like to see or have experienced in your dream scrum team? Please write to me in the comments section.

Is “Faster, Cheaper” Enough? The New Rules of Service Differentiation with Kano Model

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Service companies offerings and messages often says “Faster Time to Market” or “Reduce your Cost of Development“…. Do you think it is a game changer NOW? I would agree if it was couple of years back. But is it still? Applying Kano analysis here could reveal few thoughts.

For those not familiar with the Kano Analysis, there are three types of features or needs. This is more easily depicted in below picture:

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User Stories: Lack of Big Picture Leads to Blind Man Product

by Avienaash Shiralige 5 Comments

One of the Scrum values is “Focus”. It can make or mar a product. It brings direction to the development of a product – from start to finish; and is the back-bone of an effective business strategy.

Having said that, overdo it and the tables are turned. Fret too much over ‘focus’ and what could have been a blessing may become your curse.

Here’s why:

Analyse this picture. Highly focused teams (teams seeing project from sprint to sprint) may well become blind to the big picture perspective.

Scrum Team Dependency on User Experience/Wireframes

by Avienaash Shiralige 7 Comments

Dependency management is a key aspect in Scrum. Dependencies between Scrum team members, between User Stories, between core and extended team, between team and product owner – all have an impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the team.

I often see Scrum teams having dependencies on User Experience/Web Developers. This is because PO has defined requirements for new sprint, and UI/Web-Developers who are part of development scrum team start working on this now. Wire-frames are yet to be created as per these requirements.