How to go from napkin to development — Ideating the Product Backlog

The Situation

So you have identified the business problem and at a high level you’ve defined an approach for solving the issue. You have the idea – how do you turn it into a solution? How do you turn that idea/solution into a product which has a life and a vision which can support changing as your business changes? How do you execute your vision for the product through the agile project management framework? Where do you start?

This is the most common situation thought leaders face when acting as product owners/intrepreneurs for their organization – how do you define the initial Product Backlog for the potential project?

The process of generating, developing, and communicating a new idea is referred to as ideation.

Recently I worked with a Client seeking to replace an antiquated data mining software tool which had been in place for 10 years without any maintenance, updates, or even an assigned technical resource. The tool had hobbled along maintaining usefulness, but falling behind in performance and features. Finally the time had come to determine if the data that the tool mined was useful to the business and if the tool should be reengineered. Management was pushing hard to understand the business value of the data being mined to determine if pursuit of moving forward with tool selection was worthwhile, or if the business should abandon it all together.

As an Enterprise Business Analysis (BABOK v2.0, Chapter 5, p81) project, your ideation should include the following activities:

•  Define Business Need
• Assess Capability Gaps
• Define Solution Scope
•  Determine Solution Approach
• Define Business Case

Define the Business Need

You will need to first define the business need, which is the problem to be solved or opportunity available to your organization. During our engagement, the Product Owner surveyed the organization to understand the businesses perception of how the mined data led to business objectives and tasks. I then assisted the Product Owner, conducting qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and thought leaders. The goal of the survey was to determine the value of the mined data to each stakeholder’s role and their perception of the value that this data had to other business areas. The overall objective is to get others to tell you that the resolution of your situation is crucial to the business and not just to you alone.

After you’ve collected all of your research information, you will want to sort things out. I used a thematic analysis approach for synthesizing, to emphasize and record patterns found within the data. We interpreted various topics from the thematic analysis of both the interviews and the responses to the open ended questions used in the survey.

The final step to defining the business need is to validate your findings and your assumptions with the business. I facilitated a brainstorming session with our Client’s key stakeholders, thought leaders, and expanded functional managers using the thematic topics identified via the team idea mapping approach. The session was framed by disclosing the results of the survey and qualitative interviews and reviewing the dominant themes. Individual ideas of similar context from the session were combined and consolidated. The group then prioritized the ideas ultimately identifying the epics for the forthcoming solution.

Brainstorming Session

Assess Capability Gaps

Using the Client’s existing ten-year strategic plan, I conducted a capability mapping of the Client’s defined tactical activities to accomplish identified strategic objectives and create a model associating the business capabilities, processes, and functions with a factor that the data being evaluated supports towards enabling them. This capability mapping allowed me to model the most stable elements of the business and associate a value by which the mined data contributed to the accomplishment of business objectives. I then performed a value chain analysis to understand the sequence of activities the Client performed and how the data in question sustained the development of final service offerings.

Value Chain Analysis

Strategic Alignment

Not all organizations have a well-documented strategic plan, so you will need to identify the measure you will use to align your business need to the overall objectives of your organization.

Determine Solution Scope

Now that you have a good understanding of the business problem, the need of the organization, and the business value your solution contributes towards the accomplishment of business objectives, you need to define just how much of the problem you want to actually fix. It may be tempting, but you should not try to solution for the entire problem all at once. It provides more benefit to your organization if you solution for the highest impact items first and then proceed with fixing the remaining aspects over time.

Using the interview notes and ideas generated from the brainstorming session, I identified the new capabilities required to meet the business needs. We accomplished this task by documenting the high-level requirements elicited during the qualitative interviews and the facilitated brainstorming. These requirements were then aligned to the epics defined during the brainstorming session and further categorized into functional groupings, resulting into an initial product backlog. The product backlog was entered into the organization’s requirements management tool, capturing all of the features and functions necessary to characterize the product which are critical to the solution success.

  

Determine Solution Approach

The project team posited three solution options with Rough Order of Magnitude Estimates for each:

• Option 1 – Buy a New System – from commercially available options

• Option 2 – Leverage an Existing Platform – using an existing technology stack which the organization has great familiarity to create a custom tool

• Option 3 – Leverage an Existing Product – expanding the use of a product solution already implemented to include managing the data in question

Define the Business Case

The final step in the process is documenting the reasoning for initiating the project. Our deliverable outlined the:

• Business problem with supporting background,
• Assessment of business value,
• Risks, and
• Critical success factors for the project, and
• High Level Business Requirements

You have finalized your case for persuading management to take action. You will need to present the ideas and associated findings to the key stakeholders and decision makers. Working along with the Product Owner, I presented the findings to the organization’s leadership demonstrating the business value in a pitch to secure funding for the project.

Your organization may have a PMO or other formal project governance entity in place. Once your project is approved, the final Business Case can be leveraged to create any Project Charter documentation as well as any other PMO required Project Initiation deliverables. Regardless of the Solution Approach, once your project receives funding, as the Product Owner, you now have the initial Product Backlog which will support all Pre-Game Scrum Activities.

– And you are on your way to the start of a successful Agile project!

Good luck!