August 2009 - Posts

• Transitioning to Scrum: Selecting the Product Owner

  Many teams moving to Scrum have questions about the Product Owner position. Is the Product Owner a member of the Scrum team? What role does the Product Owner play in the day-to-day life of a Scrum project? How do we map current functional roles to Scrum roles, specifically with regard to the Product Owner? Who should we select as our Product Owner? Let me start by saying the Product Owner is perhaps the most important role in Scrum… something you don’t often hear from Scrum folks. The Scrum process defines the Product Owner as being the person responsible for the team’s return on investment, i.e., the Product Owner will be judged by whether the project’s outcome justifies its cost. Another, more direct way of saying this is to identify the Product Owner as “The Single Wring-able Neck,” or the person whose head is on the figurative chopping block if the project fails. Interestingly, the Project Management Institute has a similar definition for project managers: the person assigned by the performing organization to achieve the project objectives (PMBOK Guide, 4th Edition, p13). Therefore, based upon both the Scrum and PMI definition, the Product Owner responsibilities are equivalent to those of a project manager. This is one reason why I have found knowledge and competence in project management to be a key ability of a successful Product Owner. Selecting a Product Owner therefore naturally starts with identifying candidates who have that knowledge. There are other skills and abilities required, including sufficient technical knowledge to understand the problem domain and the technical aspects of proposed solutions. A successful Product Owner doesn’t need to be the best software developer on the team, but he does need to be able to understand the technical decisions well enough to know whether they make sense.  Eliminate candidates who lack sufficient technical ability. Be especially careful not to view the Product Owner as the project's ‘driver.’ Scrum is about empowered, self-managing teams which are led (pulled) rather than driven (pushed). Scrum means never having to be driven. Candidates who can’t or won’t embrace the servant-manager philosophy, or who insist on directing the team should be disqualified. Nothing will cripple your Scrum implementation more than a de jure Product Owner who sees himself as a de facto team manager. By now, you should have narrowed the candidate list to those who have demonstrable technical, project management, and interpersonal skills. Who among the remaining candidates has the ability to understand the customer, the market, and the business? Are there candidates with entrepreneurial experience? Owning a business, starting a business, or working in a leadership position at a startup where everyone wears a multitude of hats and understands making money is the true test of whether or not the customer is satisfied is invaluable. People with this experience understand what really matters because they’ve lived it. People who have had experience in customer support, QA/test, or sales and marketing at larger companies may also have an understanding of the customer. Now you should be down to the final few candidates. I like the Toyota Production System concept of a ‘Chief Engineer’ with extensive technical, project management, and business knowledge who leads the team to successful project completion. We’re talking about candidates with a software development background, successful project management experience, who have dealt effectively with the customer and understand business realities, and with the skills and experience to successfully act as a proxy for the customer and other stakeholders. Which of the remaining candidates most closely matches this description? If there is no one, have any of the candidates shown promise that they can develop to this level? If the answer is still “No,” then you may want to hire someone with the necessary talents and skills to fill the position. Posted Aug 13 2009, 12:23 PM by John Clifford with 4 comment(s) Filed under: agile, Scrum, management, product owner, project management

• Scrum Smells: Going Along To Get Along

  A question was posed on one of the Scrum discussion forums recently about changing the sprint backlog during a sprint. The scenario was as follows: the sprint has been running for 2 days when the Product Owner comes to the daily standup and wants to replace a committed sprint backlog item with one of equal size in the product backlog. What should the Scrum Master do? As this was a real question posed to the forum, I wondered how often the Product Owner comes to the team two days into a sprint to rearrange the sprint backlog? What a stinky Scrum smell this is. One of the major hindrances to getting something done is the Tyranny of the Urgent. The reason that Scrum keeps the committed sprint backlog inviolate is to provide the team the ability to keep their heads down for the sprint instead of constantly being whipsawed by context switches forced on behalf of the crisis du jour. If the level of uncertainty is very high in an organization, the proper response isn't to relax Scrum rules by allowing changing the sprint backlog during the sprint, it is to shorten sprint duration so the organization (and the Product Owner) know that, at most, they'll have to wait for no more than two iterations to get a specific item. In my experience, the importance of changing the backlog during a sprint is almost always greatly exaggerated. (The 'importance' is usually due to someone outside the team dropping the ball on a commitment, and trying to cover it up by breaking the Scrum process.) Scrum has a mechanism for ascertaining if it should be done, however, and that is by forcing the Product Owner to make the call on whether or not to abandon the current sprint and replan with the updated backlog. Yes, this will cost up to a team-day. But following the Scrum process is exposing your problem, not hiding it, and there is a problem here. Are you going to address it, or sweep it under the rug by enabling bad behavior? I know, some people will wonder what the big deal is. Why not just go along to get along? My response is to reiterate that Scrum is as much about improving the organization as it is organizing project work. Why waste a great opportunity for improvement? What I like about this particular scenario is how it shows whether you truly understand that Scrum is really a tool for improving the organization instead of just another way to manage a project or set up the workflow. Sure, you can go along to get along by swapping out backlog items and getting the Product Owner off your back, just as you can put a penny under a blown fuse and get the lights back on, but you haven't solved the problem. In fact, you've made it more likely to blow up. Others will wonder if this somehow violates the Agile principle of responding to change over valuing a process. I'm all for responding to change. What I'm against is abandoning the Scrum process, and I'm suggesting that there is a very good reason for the few simple rules that Scrum has. One of those rules is that the sprint backlog with the corresponding commitment is locked at the moment commitment is obtained and the sprint starts. Scrum allows for changes to the sprint backlog during an iteration; abandoning the sprint and replanning and restarting a new sprint. As an aside, if you're following Scrum you shouldn't be dropping items from the sprint backlog during the sprint either; that is just a way of hiding what is truly happening. Instead, during the retrospective the team should discuss why committed sprint backlog items couldn't or wouldn't be completed during that sprint, or why the team undercommitted (if new items are continually being dragged into the sprint backlog), and then brainstorms to arrive at a solution to this problem. Stephen Covey, of Seven Habits fame, says that "courage is integrity at the moment of choice." Scrum, or any other way of doing things, won't work if the people involved lack courage, if the prevailing philosophy is "Can't we all just get along?" instead of "Do the right thing." The Scrum Master needs to demonstrate some integrity in this situation and require the Product Owner to follow the Scrum process. Either abandon the sprint or leave the backlog alone. Then, during the retrospective, a discussion on why the backlog needed to be changed should be held with the goal of trying to figure out what caused this (genuine unforeseeable emergency, bad PO planning, someone dropped the ball on a commitment, etc.) and how to prevent this in the future. Otherwise, expect constant pressure to change the sprint backlog. Posted Aug 05 2009, 06:54 PM by John Clifford with 3 comment(s) Filed under: agile, Scrum, processes, management, product owner