This article describes the role of “Core Topic Responsible” (CTR) – a caretaker for overarching requirements that are spread across multiple teams. When working in a complex agile setup, such as SAFe or the Spotify approach, teams might need to deal with requirements that have strong interdependencies not only within their own team, but across the whole organization, including non-agile lines of business. We therefor recommend introducing a new role, which we call the “Core Topic Responsible”. Ideally, this role is to be assumed by a Business Analyst, who represents a central point of knowledge and assumes ownership for the overarching topic.
To resolve complex functional dependencies, we strongly recommend introducing a new role to establish ownership for a specific overarching requirement.
The main purpose of this role is to act as the go-to-person, as he or she is tasked with maintaining the holistic picture for an overarching requirement in terms of:
- domains and stakeholders affected by the requirement
- architectural dependencies that need to be considered during IT delivery
- features which are contributing to or are pending on the requirement
As an employee in a large-scale agile project, one experiences these challenges first-hand, especially when a lightweight agile framework such as “Scrum” suddenly becomes enterprise strategy relevant and needs to be scaled, for example via “SAFe”.
As several teams are involved in the delivery, requirements can grow beyond the capabilities of one single team. Dependencies can then only be resolved if the different teams collaborate accordingly.
A decisive factor for identifying potential dependencies, in the first place, is the regular exchange between different roles within the agile teams involved, e.g., Product Owners (PO), Architects as well as Business Analysts (BA). This happens within the framework of fixed ceremonies, e.g., the so-called Community of Practice (CoP).
Ceremonies Do Not Always Need an Agenda
According to the SAFe framework, an Agile Release Train (ART) consists of several agile teams, which need to refine functional requirements from features to autonomously create user stories. Therefore, the business functions required must be broken down and described in a comprehensive manner by the acceptance criteria within the user stories. Although some agile frameworks do not explicitly define this role, a Business Analyst (BA) often acts as a sparring partner to the Product Owner (PO). One of the main tasks of the BA in this context is to ensure that business requirements are well understood and holistically addressed by the acceptance criteria.
To enable cross-team alignment, the SAFe framework includes setting up Communities of Practice (CoP) in addition to the team-internal ceremonies. Usually, these CoP meetings are intended for roles typically working on topics with impact on other teams, e.g., PO and Architects. Here, we strongly recommend also setting up a CoP or any similar alignment ceremony for Business Analysts.
In the beginning of each alignment ceremony, the members can express urgent concerns. To enable discussions about current team topics, the ceremony continues with a mood survey.
Although a CoP typically has neither a Scrum Master to moderate, nor a fully timed agenda, a lively exchange about the current topics and various action points that serve to overcome possible challenges will typically arise.
The action items which result from these discussions should be documented in a central place, e.g., a Confluence page. If the discussion shows that the topic has strong interdependencies between individual teams, a separate documentation needs to be considered.
Management Does Not Always Have To Come From "Above"
To deal with these core topics in a structured way, we recommend establishing a so-called “Core Topic Responsible” (CTR).
A Business Analyst with good communication skills and the ability to take a high-level perspective is especially well suited to assume this role and facilitate the teams as a topic owner, e.g., providing the holistic business context in architecture circles.
While the PO focuses on the team’s backlog, the BA often has more capacity to gain deeper insights into topics. Depending on the overall project complexity, the CTR might also take ownership of requirements for multiple products.
Managing Dependencies is Key
The challenges mentioned above often consist of interdependent cross-team requirements. To reduce the degree of complexity for the respective overarching topic, teams must work together in a coordinated manner and identify potential dependencies on a regular basis.
In principle, dependencies between individual requirements should already be identified while they are still in the program backlog and at the latest during PI planning in order to enable planning across the affected teams. For this, Jira offers out-of-the-box analysis such as the Dependencies Report in Advanced Roadmaps. Due to the complexity of functional and technical aspects, however, dependencies may also be identified later on, i.e., when the agile teams have already started the design or development phase.
In this case, it is important that these so-called “core topics” with their individual dependencies are documented and passed on to the Product Manager (PM) so that he or she can design and manage the overarching target picture together with the System Architect (SA).
To visualize the dependencies, we recommend a dependency diagram that contains all necessary details, is easy to read and, above all, can be adapted successively:
With this holistic overview, the CTR should also be available as a direct contact person for Developers, Testers and Software Architects, and to provide expert input in the design of the future solution.
In weekly meetings, the CTR can report the implementation status to the Product Manager and address potential problems at an early stage. Through their thematic understanding, the Core Topic Responsible can support the Product Manager and System Architect in defining the roadmap and architectural runway.
The basic idea behind this role is to establish a supporter rather than a manager. The CTR coordinates the processing of their core topics’ individual components, but also actively participates in the writing of the user stories and is willing to gain deep thematic insight.
Furthermore, the CTR takes part in alignment meetings, e.g., the CoP as well as in architectural meetings, to encourage a continuous exchange of information about the respective core topic and to manage upcoming tasks.
Summary
Especially in complex agile environments, it can be challenging to maintain a holistic overview of interdependent requirements. In this article, we described how the Business Analyst can take ownership as the Core Topic Responsible for a topic containing several requirements. This overarching role ensures the alignment between different teams and maintains a holistic view of the target picture, resulting in a consistent implementation of the requirements within the core topic.
However, one must consider that the introduction of such a role should not generate additional work for the teams, but rather reduce the overall effort. Therefore, we want to highlight the following principle of the agile manifesto:
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
