A good thing with Scrum is that it helps the team focus on short term goals instead of dealing with big tasks with dubious value. But we cannot either resign and give up long range visibility of where we are heading with the excuse of “we are doing Scrum”.
The latter is dangerous since we are not alone in building the business value of software. Sales, marketing, support, third parties -all need to work together to make the software a successful business value.
If we only provide "next sprint" visibility your Marketing manager might – after one year silent resistance of your Scrum trial – go ballistic about lack of date visibility and lobby for a return to the waterfall/Gantt approach.
So let’s demystify the roadmap: a roadmap should help you all pull in same direction.
If you can get all surrounding parties to attend your sprint demo and sprint planning, you have come a long way. But in many cases that is impractical, you would simply be to many or you might loose focus (having to explain details of scrum instead of doing actual planning for example).
A typical roadmap would stretch for about six months. If should provide the overall view as of the release dates of your sprints and the expected content (user stories).
The trick is to demystify the date and content relationship. By providing visibility in the planned dates for the sprints, the actual content in the sprints might actually matter less. You can move to a more fruitful discussion of “what happens if" (we switch the order of sprints, or move this story ).. Instead of “I have no clue in what you guys are doing” .
A simple roadmap at sprint 1 could look like:
Now after sprint 2 things change. A new competitor makes us revaluate the sprint content, order tracking switches between sprint 3 and sprint 4:
And since we publish the roadmap on a website or accessible place, we no longer need to provide tedious status reports!
Suggestions where to keep your roadmap:
- Published to a web server using Excel
- In a Google Spreadsheet
- On the wall of your coffee room
Happy Scrumming!
Great blog entry!
Thank you so much, great how something so simple adds soo much value. I have the exact problem you’re referring to! Thanks again.