This orphaned feature dashboard (pictured above) identifies feature objects that lack parent epic objects. Every orphaned object contains a risk cost. The further an orphaned object progresses along a value stream, the more unrecoverable cost that is realized. Other than top-level objects, like investment themes, all (child) objects should have parents. Ensuring all work has a lineage helps ensure full exposure of work in the system of delivery and a complete connection between strategy and execution.
You know the overall delivery capacity of your portfolio and you make a point to balance it with demand. But when looking at what your portfolio delivered this last quarter, you know you’re coming up short… way short. If you want to meet the commitments you made to your shareholders, should you be hiring more people or change the forecasted dates?
Before you decide to do that, in order to better understand overall demand and to balance the system, consider something else. It could be your delivery teams are working really hard and getting a lot of things done. Unfortunately, it could be they are working on priorities you didn’t commit to. There is a disconnect between the strategy and execution.
These disconnected and misaligned priorities are also known as orphans.
Orphans identify a lack of team work alignment that includes child stories that do not have a parent feature on the backlog. Similarly, child features may not have a parent epic on the roadmap. How does it happen? Teams generally get direction from a backlog that is aligned to a roadmap. Sometimes, teams will take it upon themselves to work on things they deem as short-term priorities. Though I do believe in local autonomy, I believe that autonomy applies to how to create a solution or solve a problem. It does not include choosing not to work on priorities defined by product owners, managers or leaders. Every hour spent on orphaned work is one less hour that can be spent on priorities on the roadmap.
Leadership should define outcome-based objectives. Epics should be defined to make measurable progress against those objectives. Those parent epics should be decomposed into child features. Lastly, those features become parents of child stories. By maintaining a lineage, we ensure alignment to our objectives and goals.
As a leading indicator, if a team or program has orphans in their respective backlogs, then there is less certainty the team will start working on commitments defined as priorities. As a countermeasure, include work alignment as part of your definition of ready (DoR). Teams should not start new work, unless it has a parent that has been prioritized.
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