Choosing the Right Facilitator When the Business Ambassador Is a Founder
A 60-person software house is running its first AgilePM project: a new customer self-service portal. The Business Sponsor is the company founder, who is enthusiastic but attends only one meeting a month and tends to answer process questions with 'whatever the team thinks'. The Business Visionary is the founder's daughter, who owns the product idea but has never worked in an agile way. The Business Ambassador role was given to the founder himself 'because he signs the cheques'. In week 3 the team needs a decision on whether a loyalty-points feature is in or out of the first release. The founder is unreachable for four days; the Business Analyst starts writing the acceptance criteria anyway. The Technical Coordinator reports that two developers have begun building the points engine 'to save time'.
1. Assess whether the Business Ambassador assignment is appropriate, and identify the consequences visible in the setup.
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The Business Ambassador is the single business voice who is available to the team day to day and empowered to make prioritisation decisions within the Business Visionary's remit. Assigning it to someone who attends monthly and defers decisions fails the availability and empowerment tests.
Consequences visible:
- Decision latency: a scope question stalls for four days, which in a timeboxed approach directly threatens the timebox.
- Role substitution: the Business Analyst starts producing acceptance criteria - that is Business Ambassador / Business Visionary work, not analyst work, and it removes business ownership of 'what good looks like'.
- Unauthorised build: developers building the points engine is solutioneering against unconfirmed scope; the Technical Coordinator now has to unwind it.
The correct move is to reassign the Business Ambassador to a named, empowered product owner who is co-located enough to answer within a day, with the founder remaining Business Sponsor. The Business Visionary should be coached to arbitrate scope conflicts, and the acceptance criteria should be pulled back to the business roles.
2. The founder insists on keeping the role. What governance mechanism would you put in place, and what is the residual risk?
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Accept the constraint but contain it: agree an explicit delegated decision authority - a named deputy (e.g. the Business Visionary plus a senior BA) empowered to decide scope within the release's tolerance, with only changes beyond tolerance escalated to the founder. Add a decision SLA (e.g. 24 hours) and log decisions in the project's daily/decision records so the founder can ratify retrospectively at the monthly meeting.
Residual risk: the deputy's decisions may later be reversed by the founder, causing rework and eroding the team's trust in the decision process. This is a governance risk to record in the risk log, owned by the Project Manager, with the Business Sponsor informed. If reversals occur more than occasionally, the role assignment itself must change - a deputy is a mitigation, not a fix.