How to Increase Stakeholder and Team Member Engagement Right from the Start - Mike Cohn

How to Increase Stakeholder and Team Member Engagement Right from the Start - Mike Cohn

Do you struggle to engage the right people in product development? You are not alone.
Development team members sometimes view their jobs as things to be endured. They want to get through the 8-hour day, go home, and then do the things that really give them purpose.
Customers sometimes really want the end-result product but hate the process of getting there. “Can’t I just wave a magic wand and get what I want?” they wonder.
Increasing engagement in both team members and stakeholders leads to better products. Achieving that level of engagement can be hard, though.
One of the ways I get people excited about a project from the start is to involve everyone in story-writing workshops.
That means I want the programmers, testers, designers, analysts, DBAs, tech writers, and so on to participate. The Scrum Master, product owner, and key stakeholders should be there as well.
I don’t advise holding a story-writing workshop every sprint. Instead, I recommend doing one every three months or so. Each story-writing workshop should be focused on a strategic objective or two that is larger than a sprint.
Sure, the product owner and team can adjust this plan from iteration to iteration. But if a team doesn’t have a larger goal in mind, their work is often sub-optimized as they go from this iteration’s crisis to the next iteration’s crisis.
You may think it will be wasteful to include development team members in these quarterly story-writing workshops.
I don’t.
I consider it an investment. Sure, team members get less done on the day of the workshop. But that pays back quickly because:
 

• Team members know more about the work they’ll do. Questions always arise when team members begin work on a product backlog item. But, if team members were present when user stories were written, they’ll have more context and fewer questions.
• Encouraging participation when defining a set of features leads to greater engagement when building those features.

Conducting approximately quarterly story-writing workshop with team and stakeholder participation sets a project on the path to succeed with agile,

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