Coaching backlog

One challenge as a coach is deciding where to spend your time – do I help team A or team B or split my time between them? If I had the capacity to give both the attention they need then it’s not a problem but of course there’s never enough time to go round. Like so many things, it comes down to prioritisation… but what goes in the backlog? Personally, I tend to think in terms of experiments, e.g. will smaller stories improve the team’s ability to respond to changes in direction?

(I should add that when I say “team” I’m actually thinking about the people in the dev team, the other people they work with, the stakeholders, and the system which encompasses them.)

But who creates the backlog items? Obviously, there are things which come up in conversations with the team members and stakeholders, but there’s also observations and comparisons between the current system and a potential “next level”. Now, we all know there aren’t actually “levels” but there are things we tend to observe in high performing teams compared to relatively new teams. I’m not going to touch on “assessments” here – I’ll save that for a future post.

In order to share this backlog with the coaching stakeholders (which includes the team) rather than a simple backlog of Stories, something like a POPCORN board can help support the conversations around which experiments to try and what the outcomes were. POPCORN is a backronym for: Problems & observations; Options; Possible experiments; Commitments; Ongoing; Review; Next – you can watch Claudio Perrone, aka Agile Sensei, present POPCORN at Agile Testing Days 2017.