[Sigia-l] Agile, Scrum and UX?

[Matthew Hodgson]

Many agile projects fail because of misconceptions about roles and
responsibilities.

A product manager is not the same as a Scrum Product Owner. The same goes
for your client or your business stakeholder. They don't care about your
agile process and so will break the rules of the process when it suits
them. Most product managers I know are too high a level to be a Scrum
Product Owner.

But yes, the Product Owner gets to say what is produced and its sequence in
the Sprints. That requires everyone to understand their role. It requires
the Product Owner to work closely with other stakeholders including the
product manager. This is why the PO role is very similar in its definition
today as the way PMBoK define a PM's role.

I never have a Sprint 0. It's an anti-pattern because it never looks like a
Sprint. I often work in PRINCE2 environments that require lots of paperwork
and setup before a project is allowed to commence, but I do all this work
using Scrum. In my current web project it meant 4 Sprints of effort and at
the 5th Sprint I onboarded the team -- 3 devs, 1 front end specialist, 1
ux, 1 web content writer. one of the devs is also the SM. I was the PO, but
I coached my BA to take over from me as I've had to focus on 'other
things'. Anyone can be the PO or the SM, but if you have no experience,
training + coaching is essential to creating success.


On 22 March 2015 at 03:54, Jonathan Baker-Bates <jonathan at bakerbates.com>
wrote:

> "... they create an Increment together that is production ready each
> Sprint."
>
> [snip]


> Interesting also that you say that a UX person might be the product
> owner or scrum master (they're very different roles in orthodox scrum,
> of course). Assuming UX designers have the necessary seniority in the
> organisation to take the place of product manager, I would think
> having UX in that position would lead to large "sprint zeros", no?
>
> Jonathan
>
>