This was my reply to Wolfrum Müller's LinkedIn post (re: "Backlogs as the Blind Spot of Agile at Scale").
Are backlogs useless, or evil?
No. It is how they are misused to de-prioritize higher value innovative work that begets their abuse.
Discarding backlogs is like throwing away a useful tool just because it isn't a hammer.
At
the poker table of business-driven priorities - technical debt will
rarely beat whatever the business says is the next-most-important-thing.
And often, for some period of time, technical debt often can only be
characterized as something that *may* threaten the business at some
point in the future...
And yet,
technical debt needs to be tracked and planned - or some variation of it
will bite you in the ass, destroy the ability of your business to
compete, create conditions for security breaches, hinder/prevent your
ability to innovate/execute, create massive obstacles to efficiently
running/maintaining/modifying systems, etc.
Hence,
backlog.
For in them - there is important (and quite often, critical)
information. Just because the business doesn't see value in something -
doesn't mean it is necessarily trash to be discarded and thrown out.
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| [image credit: PublicDomainPictures on pixabay.com] |
Backlogs are not just necessary at the team level, but also at the enterprise level:
Teams are often too narrowly focused, too narrowly scoped, and too
limited in their charter/funding - and thus, there is a need for an
enterprise-view backlog that crosses domains, business units,
organizational silos, etc.
For example:
- Platform / Shared Services
- Information Security / Security Architecture
- Information & Data Architectures
- Integration Architecture
- Business Architecture
- Infrastructure/Cloud Architecture
- Enterprise Vision / Strategy / Roadmap / Runways
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