Design Process & Scrum/Kanban
Dear community,
let's assume my teams are doing lot's of consulting work to feed potential requirements for delivery. So we do many research, exploration, validation. Around 70% of our topics are pure consulting/exploration topics, as my colleagues shared yesterday. Does it make sense to track them in our Scrum or Kanban board?
The negative impact is:
- Exploration contains many uncertainties, it is hard to estimate efforts
- affects cycle time, velocity very negatively (we don't know how much we can build in a specific timeframe, as these numbers are stretched by the exploration and consulting tasks)
- lowers predictability and forecasting possibilities with the metrics we get out of it
- leads to LOSS of transparency as our Backlog is fully loaded with "ongoing" topics
I am thinking towards only sprinting topics that are 100% clear and likely to build. For the Kanban teams I would say that we keep such topics under "refinement", rather then "in progress".
How is your opinion and experience on this?
Kind regards
Olga
It sounds like refinement to me. How though are you distinguishing between Scrum and Kanban work? It seems like this work is being handled separately through distinct teams.
I agree with @Ian that is sounds like refinement work. According the Scrum Guide refinement is an ongoing effort. Another thing the Scrum Guide says is that the Product Backlog items represent all of the work needed to improve the Product.
I don't see refinement as work needed to improve the product. It is work needed to identify what is needed to improve the product. So I don't feel that any of the work items you describe should be in the Product Backlog at all.
But this is where @Ian's question is important. If you have two distinct teams handling the work, Kanban could be a way to manage the research while Scrum is the way to handle the product improvements. But if you have a single team trying to do all of this work, I would create task lists that the team can use to make their refinement work visible to all of the other people doing that work, and keep your Product Backlog for the actual work needed to improve the product that is discovered by the refinement activities.