Others teams planning affecting our sprint
Other teams come to us in the middle of the sprint and ask to add a story. We understand that it adds business value but how can we control things from our side and let them know to organize things on their end during their sprint planning?
Why not get them to liaise with the Product Owner and let him or her make any decisions regarding business value?
Might you and the other teams need to plan together so your Sprints are not disrupted? The Nexus Guide might offer you some help.
Do you have a Sprint Goal? Think of the Sprint Goal as a gift of focus for your team. As Ian said, the Product Owner needs to decide if this new, proposed Product Backlog item is more important than the Sprint Goal. If so perhaps the Sprint needs to be cancelled, otherwise the Product Backlog item should be added to the Product Backlog for a future Sprint.
How do you currently visualize,understand and minimize the cross team dependencies,issues with the other team? Check if that process is working and needs any adaptation? Don't let the focus drift away from the sprint goal. The sprint goal provides you with enough flexibility to re-negotiate the scope/PBI's(without compensating the sprint goal) as the work evolves.
Do you have a PO who takes the call on the business value and ordering of the PBI's?
Ask your Scrum Master to direct their requests to PO. And if it's ongoing thing, then have a look at Nexus and let's know your thoughts on suitability of the same in this scenario.
@Kaizen Practitioner
Scrum Master shouldn't be a proxy. Let the other team to speak directly with PO. There is always a risk, that forwarding the message will make it disorted.
Krzysztof, I agree with KP - this isn't something for the PO or DT to fix. The SM is the one supposed to protect the team against influences/unwanted impact.
Note: We don't know whether other teams have their own POs, we don't know whether there's a single product, we don't know a lot. The OP didn't mention. If necessary, the PO could potentially be informed and invovled during sprint, and the topic should be brought up during the retrospective anyway to be reviewed (and further actioned if needed).
Hi Ayesha,
Just a question for clearification; are these teams working on the same product as your team (Scaled Scrum/Agile)?