It's true! Imagine a team of experienced, competent agilists. Now give them a poorly written, shoddy, unkept backlog. Will they prosper and thrive? Not without upgrading that backlog. On the other hand, if you take a team that is underperforming and provide them with a clear, thought out and well-written backlog you can bet they will start improving. The fact is that your backlog is a major component in your agile success and as a group, we don't pay enough attention to our backlogs.

 

During this half-day workshop we will envision, describe and build multiple great backlogs. Along the way we will talk about how the backlog impacts your business, your customer's satisfaction and your team's engagement. And you will get plenty of hands-on time with all aspects of building a backlog, from start to finish. If you build backlogs for a living, or work with people who do, then you will want to attend! 

 

Itinerary:

  1. The Perfect Backlog - Discuss the perfect backlog, what it looks like and how it should operate in the development environment. Theoritical, of course.
  2. Recipes For Backlog Items - These guided labs will describe what each backlog item should look like (the recipe) and then allow students time to build and write multiple examples of each.
    1. Epics (Guided Lab) - The largest of the large! Epics live as long as they are useful to the customer and organization.
    2. Capabilities (Guided Lab) -  Perfect for pieces of work that span multiple large business groups in your company.
    3. Features (Guided Lab) - Large, but focused on delivering specific pieces of customer functionality.
    4. Stories (Guided Lab) - Where your team lives and the actual bricks and mortar that make up your building.
  3. What To Do With Architecture & Tech Debt? So far everything has been useful in describing customer-focused work, but you still have to take care of the tech-focused work that every product requires.
  4. Estimation: How Big Is It? You will learn fundamentals of estimating ALL of the backlog items and best practices for managing the estimates.
  5. Which Goes First? A Model For Prioritization - Now that you have all of your work captured, let's talk about how to choose which work your teams should knock out of the park first.
    1. WSJF Tool (Guided Lab) You will get access to the WSJF Tool and hands-on practice in how to use it to make sense of your prioritization.
  6. RV Conversations - Use the concept of RV Conversations to help keep your team focused and sane!
  7. Reporting: Forget "every-Friday-RAG-status-update" emails, why not build a reporting structure that pulls directly from the work your teams are doing. Real time. 24x7. Always live.
  8. The Life Cycle of a Backlog Here we will pull everything from above into one large discussion of what it takes to build a good backlog and how to manage them from quarter to quarter and iteration to iteration. Plus, we'll connect the theory we discussed in #1 to real life.
  9. Elsewhere, Inc (Open Lab) - Starting with an idea for a business and titles for epics, let's build an entire, working, real backlog.

 

Seats for this workshop are limited to 20 individuals per, but we are running it twice in December!

  

  

 

Yes, the recorded session will be recorded for future promotional means, but otherwise it is identical to the non-recorded session. Feel free to choose whichever suits. Either button will take you to the Eventbrite page for that session, so sign up today!