Dejirafication free your process

Alexey Krivitsky an agile2016 lightening talk

Most of us use some sort of backlog management tools…

There are many different ones… but i’ll just call them ‘jira’

From lean thinking perspective: managing the inventory is a non-value-adding activity

Jira issue list is beamed to the wall from a PO’s notebook - That’s how Most backlog refinement meetings look like.

Those meetings are made for the team to meet with the tool. Not for team collaboration. Robots control us.

PrintedjiraissuesTime-boxeddiscussionsBreak-outgroupsworkinginparallelUpdatestojiraa;erthemee=ng

Some ideas that I’ve tried to improve the meetings:

Result: just less badly jirafied meetings.

Jirandicitis (or the ‘jira symptom’)

An observable process when team collaboration

(such as a meeting) is degrading to become

a plain tool-updating activity (with a sole goal of updating the tool).

welcome to jira rehab program

One of my client joint my jira rehab program: We went back to paper:

We use A4 sheets for stories

Backlog refinement activities are much more lively

And is about building shared understanding of product & work

It also looks chaotic but this doesn’t meet it lacks structure

So how this works in practice?

4 steps to get clean

#1 mind-mapping for product themes – no more lists

#2 JIT story slicing – minimal inventories

I call this a ‘parmigiano method’: Grate fresh stories only when hungry.

#3 backlog refinement with shuffled groups – amplify learning

#4 shape discussions – lean coffee with confidence voting

Get clean today.

#1 mind-mapping for product themes – no more lists

#2 JIT story slicing – minimal inventories

#3 backlog refinement with mixed teams – amplify learning

#4 shape discussions – lean coffee with confidence voting

Sign up for jira rehab program now!

Joint Backlog refinement

This nicely scales for a multi-teams scrum setup

That’s how our multi-team sprint planning looks like

But that’s another story…

I offer jira rehab hugs. Approach me after the talk.

Thank you! @alexeykrv