Feedback from Stakeholders – A “Done” Criterion

Each of the previous “done” criterion had the need for the individual applying the criterion to make a judgment call as to the “doneness” of the work item under review. This gives it the power necessary to determine “done” in contextual situations. However, if a person only used one of the criterion—Sufficient to Proceed, Appropriate for the Environment, or Sanity Checks—that check alone can not give a good assessment of “done”. Together they have the ability to guide the “done” decision. To confirm the individual judgment it is critical to get Feedback from Stakeholders. With feedback, we can correct and calibrate our expert judgment and become better assessors of “done”.

There are two primary stakeholders that I like to use when getting feedback on “done”. The first is those that supplied me the information used in creating the work artifact. I want them to tell me if I understood and correctly interpreted what they shared with me.

For example, suppose I am working on a technical design and I want the business customer to tell me that I correctly understood and interpreted their business requirements. Asking them to look over the design and give feedback probably would not give me the feedback I am looking for as the design is fairly technical and my business customer is not. What to do?

I could, instead, work with the customer to write up a series of scenarios or stories and then walk through the design with me while I show how the design would satisfy that scenario. This walk through may not be with the business customer but other technical peers who can see if I have a viable solution to scenario’s problem.

The second stakeholder I am after for feedback is the consumers of work artifact. Each artifact produced on a software project should be created because other people or processes need the information to do their job. Even code is information to a complier to make the 1s and 0s. The question I ask these stakeholders is, “Do they have the necessary information to do their task?”

This one can be a little dicey since there are some people out there who may insist on so much content that they are effectively asking you to do their job. For those members of staff, you may need to step back and look at role definitions and job responsibilities. Then again, you may be much better at their job then they are, so go for it!

One of the great things of Feedback from Stakeholders is that there are both an early and a late indicator of how effective is your expert judgment of “done”. Both share the same early indicator in the feedback you get from the initial review. If the stakeholder tells you that it is incomplete, you need to tune your judgment on the “done” criteria.

Unfortunately, sometimes the stakeholders do a “review” and say that the work artifact looks great. I put review in quotes since the signatures were there but that is about it. I had a coworker once put a paragraph into a work artifact that stated that all those who read the said paragraph would be treated to free beer. Eight signatures later and no mention of the beer. Not even, “You better take that out.”

Fortunately, the two stakeholders have late or lagging indicators as well. For the suppliers of information I like to watch the requests for changes. If I see a lot of changes come through, that means that my process of getting information out of the supplier didn’t really do its job. Either I missed something or, just as bad, I forced them to make decisions they were not ready to make. Either way, I was not “done”, I was just pretending.

For the consumers of my work, I like to watch defect counts. If I had the right information but put it in a way that they made mistakes, I probably wasn’t “done” either. I will want to do some analysis to make sure that the consumer isn’t incompetent but I start by assuming they are. It is my job to give them information they can use, not a pile of stuff that they have to dig through just to find (or not find) the information they need.

The early feedback and the late feedback allow me to tune my “done” criteria. Sufficiently Complete, Appropriate for the Environment, and Sanity Checks are all tied together with Feedback from Stakeholders.

Now I would love to get your feedback on these “done” criteria.