Lean-Agile
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Note that we have some Incomplete Pages That Require Work on this site:-)
Note that we have some Incomplete Pages That Require Work on this site:-)
One of the fears that many organizations have is that, as they “go Agile” and form Teams, important things will get dropped and things will get a lot worse for our customers before they start getting better. This is a well-founded business concern and needs to be addressed. The problem is that many organizations worry about “pulling the trigger” to do the agile transformation until they know how all the existing work is handled. This is a problem because:
OK, so interesting, but we still have the business concern - how do we ensure that critical work is not dropped?
When we form a Team one of the guideline that is suggested is that Team members “take their work with them” (see How Does a Team Initially Get Control of Work? for other guidelines). In other words, if you were the “on-call” person for this set of technologies in the past (and in the absence of any other change) you are still that person when you get on to the Agile Team.
Why do we do this? One reason is to ensure that we are increasing overall understanding of all the work that is happening in the team. But other reason is to ensure that we don't lose work.
As we form Teams we start to track work explicitly that the Team is working. We also typically also define a “scope” for that Team. So what happens if the work a Team member brings with them is not part of the scope of the Team. A couple of things could have happened:
Irrespective of what the outcome is, we need to ensure we know what we do with the work and we need to be explicit and visible in the outcome. In particular we need to insure that if the work is to be done by someone else, that we have a warm hand-off to ensure that this has actually happened.
The general approach determine disposition of the work via a set of filters:
There are a number of benefits to using this approach to determine where work goes to: