Its time to up the game! PBR is more than just cleaning your home!

If you have a task / job / feature / story split into different parts, and different priorities for different people, then it’s likely that you will end up with all your tasks only partially complete.

This is worse when the work is divided and assigned to people in multiple teams and there are dependencies between them.

When 100% of your jobs are 70% done, you’re in a bad way.

If 70% of your jobs were 100% finished, you’d still be able to deliver (a qualified success).

Remember, the true power of refinement is not to get 100% clear in a sub-optimal way, rather get enough clarity with all parts put together in a holistic way.

A few questions (in addition) to ask while scheduling and facilitating your Product Backlog Refinement (PBR):

• Are we dependent / is there someone dependent on us for work to get to done?
• If yes, how about their participation (if not for the entire timeslot) in our refinement?
• If no, then how are they kept informed / consulted / made responsible / accountable around the decisions we make?
• What do we need from / what we can offer to the dependent systems? In what better ways (if not involving in PBR) are we getting that information / ask sorted out?