Stakeholder availability is a problem for any methodology, but Agile gets hit particularly hard. The User Stories Workshop is most vulnerable; although the rest of the process uses a single Product Owner, the USW needs representatives from all over the client organisation. This, combined with a typical half-day duration, makes it very hard to schedule.

Above a certain level in the management hierarchy, nobody’s ever really 100% present in any case. At our last workshop, both high-level stakeholders had mobiles out, dealing with incoming emails that are more polite, but not much less disruptive, than incoming calls.

So we extended the coffee break to a fifteen-minute Blackberry Break. Those with urgent issues dealt with them. Everyone else had an out-of-band chat about how the process was going, and dealt with other todo items like external dependencies and scheduling.

We returned to the meeting with everybody focused. Going forward, we might even make this explicit: “there’ll be a Blackberry Break every half hour”. For product demos, we could go as far as “this is a fifteen-minute demo. Phones off, please”.

Singletasking: it’s the future..