#175 – Reaching the Business Owners

The Business Owners in SAFe are defined as a small group of key stakeholders who have the primary business and technical responsibility for governance, compliance and return-on-investment of systems/solutions/products developed by an Agile Release Train, and who evaluate fitness for use and actively participate in certain ART events, such as PI Planning and PI System Demo. Especially Product Owners and Product Management (should) communicate frequently with the BOs in order to align expectations and maximize value-add of deliveries.

For this to work, the product people should stop believing that the Business Owners know how to act as the important input givers they are, as they, often, don’t have any other background for the scaled agile ways of working than a Leading SAFe course (and we bet you that they didn’t take the certification test). Therefore, POs and PM should be proactive in their communication, collaboration and involvement of BOs–typically, and in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, they can be managed as a group.