Prioritization between Agile Teams (W3-Blue)

Context:

In an environment where we have multiple teams, each with a product owner, how do we adjust the team priorities to ensure that overall business priorities are met? For example, team A may have a high priority story that is dependent on work by team B, but that work is a low priority for team B. What have people tried? What works?

Practices / Guidelines:

•             must get the product owners together to hash out the organization-wide priorities – individual teams can support this effort but can’t make the decisions

•             create a culture of working to common goals set by leadership

•             Make decision making based on data / metrics (e.g., what are the ROI of the competing items? What is the opportunity cost of deferring one of them?)

•             Break up the dependencies – does team A need a large chunk of functionality from team B? what is the smallest amount of work that B needs to do to unblock team A? Can a few incremental deliveries by team B doing “just in time” unblocking of team A?

•             do interop development – have 1 person from each team pair to accomplish the goal – deepens the understanding of the dependency

•             define “ready for dev” as “no unresolved outside dependencies” (this is very situational – context matters a lot)

•             Do frequent reviews of the cross-team dependencies and priorities to assess any new data or insight (e.g., the business needs have changed a bit and the priorities have changed, team A figured out a way to reduce their dependency)

•             Book: “The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development” (http://www.amazon.com/The-Principles-Product-Development-Flow/dp/1935401009)