As a product manager inheriting a existing project & Backlog what sanity/hygiene checks are best ?

[Dan]

For example looking for issues that should have been in the Backlog but are not, etc.

Basically I want to try and minimise the risk for me of historic bad practice causing me problems in the future.

[Colum McAndrew · Accepted solution]

Hi Dan. I inherited a project recently, and the first thing I did was tackle the backlog. There were over a 1000 tickets in it, most of which hadn't been looked at for ages. I went through and analysed whether the tickets were still required.

It is common for folk to run a report on their backlog, to find tickets with no activity in the past six months. Once found, the tickets are cancelled. After all if there's been no activity on them, the chances of them ever happening are small.

In my case this wasn't always true. I adopted a slightly nuanced approach to cancelling tickets. If there was useful information in the ticket, I kept it in the backlog but added a label to it. This allows me to identify tickets I've previously looked at.

I'd also look at your project's statuses. It is common to stick to the default ones, but these may not meet your needs. Don't be afraid to change your board as required.