Management Bug

Eduardo Espinheira
3 min readJul 29, 2020

Here is your weekly dose of Human Management with some more food for thought to leverage your growth.

Since we believe the Management Bugs are common and typical, every description is created and adapted from articles, blog posts, and definitions from other sources and authors.

A MngtBug is a problem, cause, or impact in a human manager’s decision, which produces an incorrect or unexpected result. Every other week we share a little bit of our knowledge base on social media and our newsletter. This week’s MngtBug is…

Details

This week’s “Lack of Sprint Backlog” is a very specific problem.

By definition, the Sprint Backlog is the set of Product Backlog items selected for the Sprint. (1)

(2)

Why is Sprint Backlog essential?

It is a popular practice in Scrum which provides a noticeable portrayal of the status of the User Stories constantly in the backlog and is represented on a task board or Scrum board. The Sprint Backlog makes the teamwork visible which the team identifies as important to accomplish the Sprint Goal. To follow the continuous improvement, it adds a minimum of one high-priority process improvement discovered in the last Retrospective meeting.

Though the tasks that are missing from the committed user stories can be added to the Sprint Backlog, it is necessary to ensure that new user stories are not added once the Sprint Backlog is committed and finalized by the Scrum team. If any new requirement emerges during a Sprint, they should be included in the overall Prioritized Product Backlog and added in a future Sprint. (3)

A sprint backlog allows the team to focus on a clear scope for the length of the sprint. A sprint backlog provides a team with a clear focus for the short term.

Without a clear and explicit sprint backlog defined companies lose some benefits, like:

  • A stable list of product backlog items in a sprint backlog protects the team from changing priorities and interrupts.
  • A toll to showing the progress of…
Eduardo Espinheira

Eduardo Espinheira is a Consultant, Facilitator, Manager, Public Speaker, Creator of the Management Bugs&Fixes and the Machiavellian PM Stories