How do you remind your Scrum Product Owner about his promises/actions?
- by Felix Ogg
** EDIT: Rephrased the question to re-focus **
Our Scrum team meets as seldomly as possible, but we meet with the product owner every chance we get. We track everyone's agreed action points (particularly theirs). We are 100% agile, but our product owner lives in traditional world, we remain off-site. We facilitate him in crossing over to our fast-paced world.
There's not much wrong. The team and the PO are in good spirits. PO is present at every meeting and positively energized. Just imagine this person as a 70 year old, slow grandpa, who is forgetful, yet kind. In reality he isn't, but he is used to a working environment (public servants) that is much slooooower. Manyana-manyana etc.
It is frustrating for my team to cooperate: PO lives in a non-prioritized environment, and everyone in it has learned the productivity-technique of NGTD (Not Getting Things Done). He WANTS to, it's just that he forgets or 'sinks' somewhere along the away.
We have experimented with
a text file, maintained by the Scrum master (low-tech), which he broadcasts by e-mail every day
JIRA, our issue tracker. Turns out this is nice for programmers, but too steep for 'regular people'
I Googled for Issue tracking webtools but came up empty handed: All tools are aimed at IT issue tracking, instead of meeting action point tracking/planning for mere mortals. I did find TODO-lists like RememberTheMilk, but they don't track comments, and - to be honest - I doubt we could get our product owner to use it (too complicated).
We have three requirements:
Register action points, assign to a team member and a deadline
Offer anyone to 'comment' on progress of any action point
Do not build our own tool from scratch
We do not need:
- impressive authorization models,
- multi-project,
- workflow,
- crosslinking.
Is there any trick/tool you use to assist your product owner 'fly' like the rest of the rest of the team?
Communication before tools
I agree with the general consensus that one should not try to apply technology to a communication problem, however in this case I am merely looking for a tool to save me time in setting up prioritized lists.
I found www.thymer.com today, may be what I am looking for. The guys are cool. It is getting rather feature-bloated though.
