- Outside the Product Owner and the implementation team, senior stakeholders may require milestones articulating deliverables.
- Epics or Themes, high-level declaration of the “Release” essence, rolls up from Features, and Product Backlog Items (PBI). Relative effort estimations may be applied at the PBI level, and then rolled up to calculate/guestimate the duration of Epics.
- Look toward SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) to change the culture by providing an opportunity for the entire organization to participate in the Agile process. “Product Increments” present windows of opportunity every 8 to 10 weeks.
- Product Increments may involve multiple scrum teams, their scope, and how these teams may intersect. In order to synchronize these Scrum Teams, SAFe introduces Agile Release Trains (ART), and Release Train Engineers (RTE) to coordinate cadence of the scrum teams to be in alignment with Epic and Feature deliverables.
- Stakeholders may require a “waterfall” plan to understand delivery timeframes for milestone artifact deliverables. For example, “When do we deliver in the plan? We have dependencies on XYZ to build upon and integrate”
- External teams may have dependencies on artifacts delivered in the plan thus cross scrum team interaction is critical, sometimes through a reoccurring ceremony “Scrum of Scrums“.
- Additional transparency into the scrum team or the “Circle of Trust” can be provided through the use of Dashboards. Dashboards may contain widgets that produce real-time views into the current initiative. Key Project Indicators (KPIs), metrics being monitored to determine the success of Product ABC Epic Phase completion.
- Dashboards may include: Average Team Velocity, Burn Down, Burn Up, Bug Status by Severity, and metrics that are initiative focused, e.g. N out of Y BI Reports have been completed.
