Often when I do an analysis for customers, I find that less than 10% of the work that is currently in progress (work that has been started and not yet completed) is the priority (strategic, linked to improving the desired business results/OKRs).
I find that because there is a prioritized backlog per team, with separate priorities per team, or teams working on different priority features that lower priority work is often focused on at the expense of higher priority work.
This is very different from the original scrum notion of a single ordered product backlog where the available capacity swarms around the highest priority item(s), making sure any priority work that gets blocked gets unblocked rather than instead pulling in lower priority work to make sure everyone “stays busy”.
What are some tips or tricks that you use to ensure your team is working on the highest priority, value add work?
Some practices that I see used that come to mind include:
- Ensuring the desired, measurable business results (Value, cost, quality, happiness) inform planning and execution. The work planned and in progress aligns to the desired results/investment. I like using the Business Results section in Viz to keep it front and center, able to be compared with the flow metrics.
- Proactive dependency management, for example, daily or no less frequently than weekly to make sure that priority work is unblocked. I like using the Bottleneck Finder for this to see what may be sitting in “wait” states.
- Discussing tradeoffs when unplanned work comes in. What is the lower priority work that is removed? Tagging unplanned work and tracking over time, documented in retrospectives so that the impact and tradeoffs are made transparent to stakeholders.
- Ensuring a benefit hypothesis is on features so that the feedback can be tested once delivered to ensure critical learning/feedback loop informs the upcoming planning
- Performing a retrospective that can then inform planning on what work was completed in the past period, how long it took to complete and why, whether it was the priority work, as well as how it performed with customers (did customers use it, find value in it?)
For me, this is the “Effective” part of effectiveness and efficiency. Otherwise you could be efficiently be headed in the wrong direction with your investment! I’d love to hear how your team ensures “effectiveness”, or any challenges you may see with this.