Here’s How Backlog Grooming Helps with Resource Management
Resources.
They can make or break your initiatives. In fact, a State of Resource Management and Capacity Planning Benchmark Study found that the failure to manage resources only leads to challenges like poor prioritization and lack of visibility into capacity.
So, success depends on how well you’re managing resources for your projects and business initiatives. A good way to do that is through backlog grooming — one of the most important on-going scrum activities.
Wondering how that can happen? Continue reading and you’ll learn the basics of resource management and how backlog grooming can help you manage resources to deliver value successfully.
What is Resource Management?
You probably know by now that resources, scope, and time are the basic building blocks of a project (we’re talking about the inverted agile iron triangle). But you can actually further divide resources into human and non-human types, which include but are not limited to:
Staff
Employees — regardless of their employment status, i.e., full-time or part-time — are truly the backbone of any project or initiative. They’re the ones who execute planned tasks or activities assigned to them.
Expertise
If staff is the availability of team members to execute activities, expertise is having the right team member to effectively complete said activities. Different initiatives have different requirements, and it’s important to match staff and their skills to the right tasks for optimal productivity.
Budgets
Improper cost estimation is one of the major reasons for project failures as plans can only be materialized with adequate financial backing.
Equipment
Depending on the nature of your organization and projects, equipment and tools can be further divided into tangible assets like computers and intangible assets like software. Let’s say that you’re managing an agile marketing team. Making sure that important software like Adobe Creative Cloud is available is important for the Design team to efficiently complete their tasks.
So, resource management is the ability of a manager or an organization to maximize the use of resources so that projects and the scope are delivered on time.
How Does Backlog Grooming Improve Resource Management?
Now that you’re pretty clear about resource management, let’s dive deeper into backlog grooming.
Backlog grooming — also known as backlog refinement or scrum refinement — is a regulated process where product owners or project managers and their teams review and prioritize items to be developed, and then escalate them from the product/project backlog to the sprint backlog.
💡 Keep in mind that depending on the nature of your business and team, you can use product and project backlog interchangeably. If your team doesn’t develop products, but rather executes projects like marketing campaigns, then project backlog is where you store project tasks. Regardless, you still need resources to complete the planned tasks.
When backlog refinement is done right, here’s how it will positively affect your resources:
Minimize Potential Roadblocks
When you allocate resources properly, there’ll be fewer roadblocks. For example, it can be as easy as determining the complexity of a task and making sure to assign it to the right available team member during sprint planning later on. Or it could also mean that a task has adequate information before anyone can start working on it. This ensures that the task gets done without a hitch within the sprint cycle.
Maximize Productivity
As a manager, productivity is probably your mantra. But the actual mantra should be productivity without burnout. Again, through proper backlog grooming, you can ensure that no resources are overutilized. But at the same time, it’s important that you’re getting the most out of a resource before you add more.
Optimize Resource Spend
With minimal blockers and maximum productivity, you can then optimize your resource spend. Also, when you prioritize which tasks to work on first through backlog refinement, you can ensure that you’re not blowing your budget on low-value and low-priority items.
Get On-Time Value Delivery
Besides the point above, a successful backlog grooming session helps to reduce time to market for you and your team since planned activities can progress without roadblocks.
Improve Resource Forecasting
The beauty of scrum is the ability to iterate incrementally, not just for planned tasks, but also the way resources are managed. So, when you continuously groom your backlog for optimal resource usage, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t for future projects.
Step-by-Step Backlog Grooming Guide to Manage Resources
A successfully refined backlog should be DEEP — it stands for Detailed, Emergent, Estimated, and Prioritized — which will then help you manage your resources better. Here’s a step-by-step guide to do that:
Step 1: Break down large initiatives into smaller tasks.
Remember that each unit of work should be small enough to be completed within a sprint. This way, your team members will not accidentally overcommit. Their capacity and expertise can then be allocated for other important tasks. In Jira, this is as easy as breaking down an epic into smaller stories.
Step 2: Add adequate context to tasks.
Your backlog items must have adequate contextual information like instructions, briefs, acceptance criteria, requirements, etc., that can be understood and developed by your staff. Context also helps to determine if you need any new resources. Back to our agile marketing example, let’s say that the Design team is tasked with creating a demo video. And while grooming the backlog, you realize that they would need new video production software. So, be sure to add this in the task context.
Step 3: Remove unnecessary tasks.
We all have come across a task that only gets postponed multiple times simply because someone added it to the backlog thinking that it would be “nice to have.” When refining your backlog, be sure to remove such tasks that don’t provide business value so that you don’t waste your resources. Also, less headache for you!
Step 4: Prioritize tasks well.
In Jira, the default task priorities are High, Medium, and Low with room for additional priority levels. So, be sure to assign accurate prioritization to each task so that team members can manage their workload efficiently. Like we said earlier, you should always allocate resources for high-priority and high-value tasks first. This will also translate into improved budget efficiency.
Step 5: Include appropriate estimates.
Don’t forget to estimate the tasks with your team-specific standardized metric (e.g., story points). This can help you gauge their sprint capacity.
By the end of the scrum refinement process, you should have a backlog that considers the availability of your resources.
Refine Your Backlog to Better Manage Your Resources
It’s clear that backlog grooming is a critical scrum activity and getting it right can help you manage your resources even better. If you’re in Jira, using a dedicated backlog grooming app can accelerate your refinement process.
Ultimately, you’d want to successfully respond to changing business needs and ship value faster.
You can check out our guide to Jira backlog grooming to learn other expert tips and best practices that can take your scrum refinement process to the next level.
