5. Do some stakeholder analysis
Where did the Feature come from? Who’s interested in it? What business processes does it support? What personas are involved? All essential information for the team when identifying the Stories and planning their work, particularly the on-going collaboration with their users and stakeholders that will be essential whilst evolving their solution.
6. Socialize the Features with the teams
Although the exact priority and the final set of Features for consideration won’t be clear until just before the planning event itself, the themes and expected features for the next PI will emerge during the current one. These can be socialized with the whole of the Product Management / Product Owner group and made visible to the teams themselves. The final list itself can be made available prior to the planning event so that teams can get an idea of the big picture and the relative priorities. Socialization of high priority Features is a good thing to do, but do not allow teams to spend too much time analyzing all of the Features, as some Features may drop out of scope and so this time would be wasted.
Rest assured, you will not need to apply every single one of these activities for every single Feature in your program backlog. For example:
Many Features will have no significant architectural impact and will only require normal amounts of testing.
You don’t need to socialize every Feature. You should only socialize the highest priority and most unusual Features with your teams.
And most new Features will not be impacted by additional governance and compliance issues.
It is however always worth considering the potential wider impact of each Feature as this will impact on the estimate used when prioritizing the backlog and provide useful information to help the team quickly get started on their own story identification and planning.
Conclusion
We hope this series of articles will help you avoid some of the more common pitfalls of using Features to drive your agile development at scale. Remember just say no to waterfall practices in all their many disguises. Just say no to waterfalling your Features and stay agile!