Yay, you are part of an Agile team, and the team has committed to delivering a couple of story points, and you're beavering away doing your thing, and... your design must be reviewed and validated by the compliance team and the security team, and the PMO would like to know how much actual honest-to-goodness time you're going to spend on this because time is money.
There are some Agile principles that pose greater problems than others when it comes to implementing them in practice. The idea of 'empowering' teams to make design decisions and define what constitutes 'done' is important in Agile, but what should actually happen when business functions which are not directly responsible for delivering product nonetheless demand to be involved ? How can the team be considered empowered if they must get sign off on their decisions from such functions ?
In fact, the problem here arises when this sort of interaction is simply considered to be a 'background' task, and is not made explicit. This is the Agile anti-pattern - out-of-team approval / signoff that the team is somehow just expected to make happen in the course of their sprint. Why should any team be put in the position of having to estimate the time/effort needed for another team to do it's work, in order to give an estimate for their work ?
This is a problem for the Product Owner primarily, who needs to understand exactly what involvement other parts of the organisation will expect to have, and can build that knowledge into her story structure.
Generating an output for another business function may be a story in it's own right. Viewed in this way, empowerment is not the issue. Whenever there is an approval flow that requires involvement of entities outside of the team, that must always be considered as a termination condition for that story - it's for the Product owner to manage stories with this constraint in mind.
In other words, for the purposes of velocity measurement, as soon as the team must wait for an external approval in order to continue ( i.e. some sprint artefact has been delivered to an external entity ), that story is Done from the team's point of view, and a new story must be used to pick up the now-approved thing and move it towards a conclusion.
© Mark de Roussier 2021, all rights reserved.