Doreen Klem
Product Owner
Biography.
With more than 20 years of dedicated service, Doreen has been an integral part of CERN’s journey, contributing significantly to its success. For the past several years, she has served as a Product Owner demonstrating expertise in the implementation of SAFe Agile methodology.
In various roles and responsibilities within CERN, especially as a Product Owner, she has played a pivotal role in driving an innovative approach to fostering collaboration between business and development team.
Her team introduced the notion of business collaboration points, emphasising the importance of business-side collaboration in delivering value and achieving PI objectives. This initiative led to stronger teamwork, shared responsibility, and aligned efforts toward achieving business goals.
Talk.
Business Collaboration points for PI objectives
Inspired by the SAFe framework, we have adopted the practice of assigning business value to PI objectives. It is a process to foster conversations, collaboration and alignment between the development teams and their business partners. The values convey a clear understanding of the desired goals and outcomes between team and business partners. Thus, they provide a unique tool to create an immediate feedback loop from the teams back to the Business Owners, allowing a quick validation of the teams’ grasp of the desired outcomes.
One of our teams experienced lack of engagement and collaboration from their business partner, while being dependent on them to deliver the desired value. During an inspect and adapt session, they brainstormed a way to highlight that the active involvement of the business is essential.
As an experiment they implemented Business Collaboration Points for PI objectives. It is a means to show the value the business partner brings in achieving PI objectives in collaboration with the team.
As a result, the value becomes a shared responsibility between the development team and the business partner.