I mentioned last week that I’d been to an interesting meeting discussing (and challenging) a few of the Scrum ideas. One of the questions we asked was about Backlog Visibility.
We all agreed that by making the backlog visible to our customers would invite feedback and reduce the likelihood that we’d spend time developing features which gave little value to our clients (see last week’s post on exactly what “value” is). But we couldn’t shake a distinct unease at making our plans visible, it took quite some discussion to articulate why this was.
Many customers and businesses work to project plans (ours included), they have long term visions of where they want to be and what they want to achieve. We realised with some trepidation that by sharing a fluid and ever changing backlog list of ideas with these customers it would create an expectation, which upon the next meeting would lead to disappointment as we had to admit the features we discussed were never in fact developed.
In an Agile environment we want to encourage this change, we want to update our backlog to remove unnecessary items and reorder the list to put the maximum value items at the top. However when presenting this to a client it could undermine us, particularly if the customer liked several of the items we ultimately decided to prune.
We decided that this is where clear communication is key. We talked about making it extremely clear that these were items we were considering working on and not a definitive product plan. A Development Forecast we suggested, after all – no one blames the weatherman if the reality turns out to be slightly different to our expectations!
What are your thoughts, do you share your Product Backlog with your clients? How do you handle their expectations that some work they are hoping for may still be cut?
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