Does your team struggle to meet sprint commitments because of “bad requirements”?
Our course, Better Requirements for Scrum, can give you and your team fully mature requirements that dramatically increase output
Want to Radically Improve your Scrum Team's Performance? Here's how...
Store requirements outside of work tickets
Align structure of requirements with structure of product functionality
Version control requirements just like code
Drive work from persistent requirements
Don’t start work that isn’t ready
Don’t close work items that aren’t really complete
Give teams the time they need to prepare before starting a story
Falling Behind
Nothing Seems to Help
So many Scrum teams repeatedly fail to meet sprint goals and don’t understand what’s holding them back. They might claim they need better technical practices but then find those practices aren’t having a significant impact. Frequently, teams settle on “bad requirements” as the culprit.
Investigating "Bad" Requirements
It's About the Team, Not One Individual
Of course, when engineers can point to ways that the requirement they worked to were insufficient, any good Product Owner should listen. That doesn’t mean you should jump to the conclusion that it’s because you’re writing bad requirements, though.
It turns out that, for most teams, the issue isn’t any one individual’s level of skill. It’s not the engineers’ fault for not having implemented TDD. It’s not the testers’ fault for failing to catch some bug. It’s not your fault for writing “bad” requirements.
Holding Back the Team
The Cost of Immature Stories
The most common culprit is the process around how requirements are written and nurtured to maturity. Teams can’t really hope to succeed when they start implementing a requirement that’s only half defined and Product Owners typically need longer than they are given to fully craft a requirement that incorporates all stakeholder needs and necessary details. Likewise, teams need to be given the time and space needed to collaborate with the Product Owner on a requirement to ensure that the requirement and the scope are mutually understood and agreed upon, thereby setting everyone up for success.
Unlocking Potential
Adding Requirements Maturation to Scrum
Our Better Requirements for Scrum course resolves these forces by bringing in a structured process that ensures requirements are truly ready when teams start working on them. No more surprise dependencies blowing your sprint goals.
No more missing critical details causing the work the team did in a sprint to produce the wrong results. Just smooth, consistent, predictable progress toward your organization’s business goals.
How it Helps
The Producore Framework™
The process we teach comes from the Producore Framework and it works on two fronts:
- Requirements Maturation Flow – a teamwide process that guarantees work is fully ready and can be reliably delivered before implementation begins
- Requirements as Valuable Assets – capture and storage of business knowledge in a single place so that requirements can be read, maintained, and updated over time
Transforming Your Work Experience
Unprecedented Productivity
Adding these two pieces to your team’s process will completely transform the experience of everyone involved. The team will do less work that isn’t needed and deliver more value every sprint. There will be far fewer disruptions, allowing teams to estimate meaningfully and enabling them to reliably hit their objectives. In fact, we’ve had teams that implemented the Requirements Maturation Flow go from being chronically behind to having their customers ask them to slow the pace of delivery.
Want to Radically Improve your Scrum Team's Performance?
In our 2-day, online Better Requirements for Scrum course, you will learn how you and your team can implement the Requirements Maturation Flow, guaranteeing a comfortable, predictable, reliable pace of delivery.
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