The Eternal Questions of the Spotless Scrum

Much as people question, "Why does bread fall butter side down?" and "Why is something always in the last place you look for it?" I find that Agile has its own eternal questions. The one that is the most problematic is, "Why is it that it's so hard to get business owners to commit enough time to get the work done?"

Thinking about it, there are two things that probably ought to change. The first is in properly training the business owners about the change in their responsibilities. This should be part of the agile ramp-up in an organization (and was a step we skipped), and should include information like how to work the product backlog and how to develop user stories.

The second thing is more difficult to manage and has to do with freeing up their time. It's one thing for the development organization to say they're going Agile; it's another thing for a business owner, who, says, has responsibility for managing a team of (let's imagine) customer service agents, can suddenly make all of his other work go away and sit around "being available" for the team that needs his input rather than being there for the team he actually needs to manage. This is a much more difficult thing to work around, though colocation helps (not that I think a Dev team really wants to sit in a call center), but also anticipating this by reducing other duties a business owner might have is a possibility.

How has your company handled this?

Similarly, I'm curious about initial velocity calculation, for when you're trying to figure out hw much work you can get done in your first sprint. We had no estimations of the number of actual hours our team could work during a week, so we just made it up based on what we felt comfortable saying yes to - and wound up being 25% under our actual capacity based on when we've run out of work. Ideas on how to manage this?