Requirements management with very long cycles
I’m working as a requirmenets engineer in a public administration IT department. We do work agile, however in the bad meaning of the term.
Product owner is not engaged much in requirements solicitation and business analysis. but he doesn’t allow me to talk to stakeholders or the future users of the tools. he’s quite boomerish and wants to control the stakeholders. no meetings with them are allowed without his presence. so basically whenever I try to model requirements and have questions I have to rely on PO asking the stakeholders or wait for a common meeting to be set up.
this hinders effective requirements management. further, PO is not able to prioritize properly. Either everything is as important as everything else. Sometimes it turns out that there are is no business case for some use cases. Money is spent on fantasy tools which are used by nobody really.
at one time imitative A is important, next week initiative B is important. then, two months later we need to deploy initiative A immediately. even though we didn’t finish modeling the requirements the first time.
so what happens is that we do not finish requirements elicitstion for topic A, it is beimg left in an unready state for weeks or even months, and then suddenly it pops up and is super important and needs to be finished. since ita urgency, things get implemented and - oh wonder - do not satisfy expectations. and everybody is unhappy.
any suggestions? Anybody ever expected the PO obstructing your work.