Product Owner in Sprint Reviews — Drawing Parallels with FoP

Let us begin getting clarity on who are these ‘Friends of Police’.

“The FOP Movement is a Community Policing initiative and a JGO (Joint Governmental Organization) that aims to bring police and public closer. FOP helps to promote crime awareness among the people and enables prevention of crimes. It imparts fairness, transparency and impartiality in the working of police.” — friendsofpolice.org

To be more precise,

“The FOP movement to-day constitutes the thrust towards humanization and socialization of the police force, it is sharing power with ordinary citizens taking off from our Preamble to the Constitution ‘We the People’.” — friendsofpolice.org

‘Friends of police’ volunteers directing traffic in Perumbavoor, Kerala, India | The New Indian Express

Borrowing some more inputs from www.indiatimes.com news website:

FoP which was was started in 1993 with aims like bringing the police and public closer and help the cops in non-investigation matters have around 4,000 active members across Tamil Nadu.

On its website, FoP’s roles have been listed as doing community service, follow safety and Traffic rules, lend a helping hand, follow principles of Honesty, Punctuality, and dedication, assist the Police in preventing crime, assist the Police in maintaining law and order, assist the Police in Traffic regulations etc.

Recently they were also involved in the distribution of essential supplies in COVID-19 containment zones.

Enough of knowing about Friends of Police and their purpose to serve the community at large. Thanks to their service and volunteering done selflessly.

Now, What about our Product Owner in Sprint Reviews?

Are they anywhere closer to the FoP while stakeholders coming down to collaborate with us holding the pen for most of the time in that event?

What about these questions that we receive so often and how to go about handling them?

1. Our current iteration is more of technical work involving fixing bugs, refactoring code and addressing tech debt. There is nothing stakeholders can help with their feedback and hence our PO has recommended to cancel the Sprint Reviews. What would you recommend?
2. The Product Owner is not confident enough on the work performed by the Development Team and proposes an alternative to collaborate with the stakeholders on an occasion later. Hence we ran the Sprint Reviews with just our PO alone turning up leaving a lot of recommendations and effectively using to get some of the PBIs accepted. Is this the right way to perform Sprint Reviews?
3. Our Stakeholders are distributed across the globe and there wasn’t one convenient time for the Sprint Reviews to happen and hence our PO took charge of the situation to present the work performed separately to them at her convenience. Hence the Sprint Review was cancelled. Are we doing anything wrong?

The list can go on and on endlessly with more anti-patterns giving ways to explore. Let me stop here.

Now what is coming out clearly as a pattern from all these scenarios listed above?

Sprint Review is an important opportunity for the Product Owner and Development Team to be transparent about progress, and for the stakeholders to understand progress and discuss with the Scrum Team what they can expect and need from the team to support the business goals.

It should be interesting to the team to understand how much support there is for this on-going technical work. It’s usually good to have a reminder of work completed as input in to the Sprint Retrospective, so the review can help the team too.

But what about Product Owners using Sprint Reviews as an approval meeting or cancelling it on their convenience citing reasons unconvincing and sub-optimal?

We should admit the fact that a Sprint Review is not simply a demo to the PO or stakeholders, it is also an opportunity to show other stakeholders the work that has been done. Furthermore, it is a review of the work that has *not* been done, and of the product scope that will be addressed in Sprint Planning.

Product Owners taking control of the Sprint Reviews and wanting to cancel citing reasons related to the nature of the work, availability of the Stakeholders, trust levels on the Development Team are pointless.

It looks like FoP volunteers misusing the powers and start behaving as Cops instead of aiming at bringing the Police force and public more closer and assist the Police force in their operations.

What do you think your Product Owners are? What are they up-to with stories around collaborating in the Sprint Reviews?