Managing backlog flow with the “Rock Crusher” method
A short summary
Managing the backlog is not always easy, given its importance. One can’t forget that the backlog is the only source of requirements for a product. Yet, it may have needs or requests from various stakeholders.
The backlog is valuable in dealing with unpredictability and uncertainty. But it can also disrupt progress and the flow of value, leading to significant setbacks.
IIBA’s new publication caught the attention of participants and social media during the last Building Business Capability (BBC) Conference. We talk about the book “The Rock Crusher: A Model for Flow-Based Backlog Management”, by authors Steve Adolph, Shane Hastie, and Ryland Leyton. In this article, we get a glimpse at the book’s method, with the same name.
Crushing The Rocks
The Rock Crusher method is a method of managing backlog items along the “funnel” in the most fluid way. And, for that, it crushes rocks. A “rock” is any item within the backlog. Whether it’s an initiative, feature, epic, user story, use case, defect, etc., making it method-agnostic. It should also be noted that, because it covers all these different types of items, the rocks have different sizes. But, being the funnel-shaped flow, it begins by being able to house larger “rocks”, but arrives at a point where only smaller “rocks” pass.
The “rocks” go through a set of stages. And it is normal that they have a larger size at firs . As the problem is being decomposed in its functionality, it gets less complex, and the rock becomes smaller. In the following figure you can see these stages along the funnel.
In essence, the Rock Crusher method is composed by the following elements: the Rock, the Funnel, the Thin Pipe, the Waste Gate and the Village. All will be presented briefly throughout the article.
Why Crush?
It is common to treat a product backlog as a repository where we register the requests of all stakeholders of our project/ product. As argued by Allen Kelly, in “Moving Away from Backlog Driven Development: A New Chapter in Agility?”, the backlog transforms into a bottomless pit and thus loses sight of what is important. Thus, we fall into many of the anti-patterns identified in backlog management, such as the #2 “backlog too big” and #3 “expired items”, just to mention a few examples.
Decide When To Remove From The Funnel
Throughout the funnel, prioritization is constant. The foundation of prioritization is always the value that the rock brings to the organization and the cost of implementing it. The definition of the value of rocks cannot be the sole decision of the Product Owner. But rather of a whole “village” around the product, from customers, stakeholders, backlog managers, business analysts, Subject Matter Experts (SME), Solution Owners, among others.
The perceived value maintains the rock inside the funnel and to the next stage. If not, one throws it out to the “trash” (the Waste Gate, at the leftmost part of Figure above).
If the backlog is structured to include the 3 types of requirements defined by BABOKₒ — Business, Stakeholder and Solution (plus Transition), for example in epics, features and stories, respectively, as suggested by Line Karkov — throughout the horizons of BABOK’s Agile Extension (Strategy, Initiative and Delivery), it allows the traceability of the value that a rock brings within the strategy of the organization not to be lost.
Similarly, the “age” of the rock inside the backlog is a possible indicator of the value of the rock (or, more likely, the lack thereof). The anti-pattern #3 already mentioned, “expired items”, suggests that the item is not aged beyond the next 3 iterations (or Sprints). David Pereira suggests that the ideal is between 2 and 4 months and that beyond it it’s already a waste.
The method includes a specific ceremony for group discussions of the value and cost of rocks. The ceremony gathers the elements of the “village”. We present this ceremony below.
The Ceremony That Makes The Analysis Visible To All
The “Crush Meeting” is a generalization of the regular Backlog Refinement meeting.
The goal of the meeting is to ensure that the team has enough supply of “ready” rocks (as defined by the “Definition of Ready” agreed by the team) and that these are the right rocks to work with. A team “pulls” the work through the Rock Crusher.
In this meeting, the “village” discusses the rocks that are in the different stages. This is where the analysis work is demonstrated and visible to everyone. This work falls within the 3 horizons of the Agile Extension of BABOK. For the horizon of the Strategy, it will focus on the rocks in stages of “Wishful Thinking / Big Idea” and “Speculative”. For the horizon of the Initiative, it will focus on the rocks in stages of “Speculative”, “Forecasted” and “Ready”. And here it is normal to discuss models (e.g. use cases, etc.) and estimates.
Arriving at the stage of “Ready”, the rock has been crushed and we passed to the horizon of the Delivery. The following stages of the Kanban board are already out of the scope of the Crush Meeting. Rather, they are part of the daily work (and Daily Scrum meetings, for example) of the business analyst.
It is in this Crush Meeting that the team decides to send rocks to the Waste Gate. We must ensure that this discussion always exists. The goal is to avoid one of the anti-patterns of Rock Crusher — “Nothing is Ejected Through the Waste Gate”. We must always take this into consideration. As David Pereira says, “Once the old goes away, the door opens for the new”.
Conclusion
The Rock Crusher method offers an agile approach to backlog management. It highlights the need for power and simplicity in modern agile organizations. This new publication emphasizes the importance of the backlog as a single repository, from which a team depicts its next most valuable work item. It enables agility through the ability to add, remove, reset priorities, and visualize the potential work for a product.
If you want to know more about the method, the book is the obvious go-to source. It has all the necessary information, as well as valuable discussions. There is also a lot of information available online for free. There are IIBA blogs about topics such as the village, the crush meeting and the anti-patterns. The authors have also been present in many webinars.
I hope you get good backlog management, as fluid as possible! :)
