Scrum - On Site Product Owner

At Integrum we do what we can to stick to Scrum, a loose structure for getting projects done in a good manner. So far, our partial implementation has worked great for us even with a consulting company.

One of the things we do the least that Scrum suggests is the idea that the project's Product Owner (the guy calling the shots for the project) is physically present while you write software for him. Understand that I'm not thumping anyone with a Scrum bible here - as a consulting company this is an extremely difficult thing to do as few of our clients have the resources to send us a Product Owner to be on site from out of town/state/country. We try to offset this with short daily meetings and keeping our client around on some kind of instant messaging or chat room.

There seems to be a spectrum of success that comes from how involved the Product Owner is in the project. I'm not talking about your Product Owner deciding when it's great to use a switch/case vs. if/else. Projects with owners that don't even make it to the daily meetings often leave us not knowing where the project is going, and a lot of unapproved work begins to back up. On the other side of that spectrum, being able to tilt your laptop and get a thumbs up/down allows you to condense hours worth of work into seconds. Our idea of what's good enough and what the Product Owner wants is made instantly clear when they are right there.

If you're thinking that this is a boss looming over your shoulder, or you aren't responsible because you're checking your text messages/Facebook/browsing the web as you work, then you have the wrong idea about this whole process. When the client asks "Can you just let me have a dropdown for this one field over here?" you won't have time to check on these things without having to take a formal but deserved break. Sure, you might have to do some wrangling at first to make sure the Product Owner isn't making decisions that only you are qualified to make.

Even at Integrum this is something I think we should work for more. Obviously this isn't reasonable to do constantly, but we should still strive for putting everything in that idea state.