How to deal with a client who cannot attend every sprint presentation?

Question

We are going to start with some Scrum-based projects. Sprint duration is two weeks. But, most likely, customers cannot attend the final presentation of each sprint due to distance or tight schedules (this is for a school project, so the stakes are not so high).

What is the best way to handle this?

Answer 1

I'm sorry to say that, but Scrum is more customer and business oriented than the development team. I mean, the client must decide to use Scrum, not just the development team. Quote from Ken Schwaber and Kane Mar (in this old paper ):

Scrum consists of practices and rules that will be used by management, clients, and project management to maximize the productivity and value of development efforts. Scrum takes responsibility for the development of projects from engineering and information technology and returns them to the business. With Scrum, enterprises own and manage projects, rather than throwing them over the wall into IT and hoping for the best. Scrum returns reporting to IT projects for business, requiring the business to maximize return on investment without excuse. The business uses Scrum to launch business development projects, focusing on understanding the value of investments as soon as possible.

In other words, Scrum, like all Agile methods, requires the active participation of the client, and if your client does not exist for a demonstration (the product that you are developing for him), if he is not there for a sprint planning meeting, if he cannot respond to questions, in other words, if he is not involved, your Scrum implementation will most likely be suboptimal (I will extrapolate other points, but I wonder how you will handle them using the remote client).

Now I admit that this cannot be a "big problem" for a school project.

So, back to the original question, if the only obstacle is that the client cannot be in place to demonstrate sprints, you can, perhaps because immediate feedback is important:

• contact customer
• use video conferencing
• schedule a demonstration and sprint planning meeting that day to “optimize” transportation costs.
• there is a client represented by someone else.

This is one of the nice things with Scrum, you can make the noise visible and make ScrumMaster work on it so that the team is as productive as possible. And if you cannot delete them, at least you know why your speed is not optimal.

And I hope you can use Scrum!

Answer 2

I will give him a chance, having the experience of both ScrumMaster and the project manager. I have been in this situation quite a few times. A presentation or demonstration is very important, and you will need to make it very clear to your client.

In real projects, there are several options:

1) explain to the client (again) how Scrum works. Explain to him that the role of product owner is key to the success of the project. At the very least, the (delegated) product owner must be present at the demonstration, just as he must be present at planning meetings. Make it very clear (on paper or mail, the so-called CYA tactics (Cover Your A **)) that this is his risk if he still decides not to attend the demonstrations.

2) if he really has a good reason not to attend every demonstration, try to get him to attend at least some demos, for example, once a month.

3) if this is still not possible (very unlikely), you can think about taking screenshots during the demonstration (without a client) and send them to him. You can combine 2) and 3).

4) Bribery :) Make sure every demonstration has something to eat. Cake, donuts, whatever. You will be surprised how many people suddenly appear.

In a school project, I would explain to the client that for the learning effect it is important to make the project as realistic as possible. Otherwise, you can always resort to option 3.

Hope this helps

Answer 3

If you do not have a customer / product owner to test your work at the end of the sprint, you do not run Scrum. Its key part is Scrum.

This does not mean that you cannot complete your development in a different way.

Answer 4

The owner of the product may not be a "customer", it may be the seller or someone else who understands the needs of the customer.

Having a pretending “client” that is not one of the developers is always better than developers not showing the software to anyone until it is “finished”

Answer 5

We use Scrumy and one nice thing is that the development team can make the reading pane read-only. This is an online application so that the client can see the board and the progress of his project at any time. It is updated in real time, so even if the client looks at it, it will change as the board changes. So, if you have a client who really likes to watch what is happening, but do not allow them from the developers command line, reading only in Scrumy works fine.

Answer 6

If I understand correctly, you can contact the client, but it may happen that it is not on the day of the demonstration. In this case, I would record a demo using a screencast application (e.g. camstudio ) and send it to a client and ask him / her to watch it and give feedback.

The emphasis is on feedback, not on how and when you receive it.