Often, organization delegate the Product Owner role to outsourcing companies. But is this relevant ?
Why do organizations want to outsource Product Ownership ?
I can only assume that organizations think that a Product Owner is no more than a functional project manager. They can’t be more wrong. The PO role is as explicit as its name is : the owner of the product. Nobody (not even the CEO) should be able to tell him what to do on the product. The stakeholders should only be able to try to persuade or convince him. The PO must have 3 traits to be an effective PO (in addition with his skills):
- The business skills
- The availability
- The mandate
The business skills
The PO must know…
It might be easy for you to tell your team “We’re going to use Scrum (for some reason)“. But are you able to answer all their questions about the meaning, the proceeding of those events ?
There are 4,5 events in Scrum :
- Sprint Planning
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
- Product Backlog Refinement (it’s the half, but nonetheless important, event ^^)
The last event is not described -in the Scrum Guide (SG)- as a proper event, but as a good practice inside the description of what a Product Backlog is. But, in my opinion, this is a very important event and I will explain why.
Why ?! Why do people think Scrum Masters are Project Managers ? Let’s try to demonstrate why Scrum Masters aren’t Project Manager.
(I wrote this article using “he/his” pronoun, but it definitively work with every gender).
First of all, what is a Project Manager ?
A PM (for me and for some of job description I‘ve read) is someone who bears the responsibility of the well going of a project. He manages the project. This means that he is responsible of the reporting, the risks management, the requirements analysis, the planning management and the comprehension and respect of objectives by the team. This also means that he manages the team. He is responsible of the staffing, of the assignments, of the individuals and collective performance. The team has to answer positively…
Alec Roy
After 10 years in web development and facilitating, I finally decided that I mainly wanted to focus on coaching others on Agile mindset.
