
Last but not least, watch out for delegated meeting cultures. Delegated meetings is a practice which is based on the assumption that it is more efficient to send a delegate to meetings instead of having the full team participating. This practice is used to fight the “too many meetings problem”. However, this communication structure has downsides. It requires to bring the information back to the teams, which either does not happen or happens but the information is filtered or (mis)interpreted. This is not a helpful practice because it requires good participant scheduling, is time consuming, causes information scatter, lowers productivity and creates misalignment.
…, make the “fake” Product Owners members of the development teams and involve everyone in ideation. Connect the dots by making reporting on market research data and customer feedback data a mandatory item of the Sprint Review.
… This is not a big problem if your teams are end to end capable, but have component responsibility. It takes a couple of iterations for Business and IT to collaborate on defining properly sliced features and to optimise the sizing of a releasable feature. I was successful with optimising for feature size that could be delivered in a two-sprint cadence. The features need to be split and made smaller until the group thinks they can be delivered in two sprints. This approach is ideal to get a cadence from the influx of new features to done, closing the empirical process control loop from design to delivery.