Avoid Double Vision

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Requirements Management   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

While it seems to make sense to create separate backlogs for the technical and business aspects of a project, it can do more harm than good. In addition to causing team friction and inefficiencies, it negates an essential Agile benefit: delivering value based on one prioritized vision.

In the first article of this series, we introduced the concept of anti-patterns in agile project management; that is, common solutions to common problems that rarely or never work. Since then we have described 12 such agile anti-patterns; links to each article in the series can be found at the end of this latest installment. The resulting comments show many people are recognizing their own projects and teams in this series. Discovering that our peers have experienced similar issues can be a turning point on the way to Agile success. Please join the conversation if you have more thoughts or ideas.

Agile Anti-Pattern #13: Creating separate backlog priorities

In Agile, the role of the product owner is a difficult one. The task itself sounds relatively straightforward; the product owner is responsible for creating the stories that go into the backlog, and then setting the story’s priorities in a pure stack rank. Then the team will start assigning those stories to the next sprint, starting from the top and working down until they run out of available capacity, as measured by …

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