Professional Scrum Product Owner

Outline

The use of agile as an approach to managing projects has been increasing dramatically over the last several years. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2012, agile development methods will be used on 80% of all software development projects. PMI’s research has shown that the use of agile has tripled from December 2008 to May 2012.

Agile is an incremental, iterative framework for project management and software development - where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. This disciplined project management process involves:

• A leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability
• A set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software
• A business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.

The primary mechanism to implement agile techniques is Scrum – a lightweight framework with specific responsibilities laid out for business and development.

The Product Owner role as defined by Scrum as a key role that acts as the single voice to drive development of the product. They must possess certain skills and characteristics in order to be effective and to optimize the business’ return on investment (ROI). If the Product Owner is ineffective then the Scrum team will be too.
Product managers are responsible for juggling competing priorities of customers, the marketplace, and their business, all while managing risk within a state of constant change. Additionally they must organize and prioritize the competing needs and interests of their own company, from systems architecture to financial performance and strategic alignment. These responsibilities are very difficult in large, global organizations that develop and market interrelated products and product families. But they are also difficult in smaller companies whose customers require continuous improvement in real-time. This course teaches techniques for fulfilling these responsibilities. In the course, we address how to optimize the value of current systems. Students learn how to progressively order requirements and work to become more Agile. The goal will be releasing products as fast as needed and no faster than customers can absorb. The steps to reach this end point will be addressed in detail.

Section 1: Product Management 

• What is product management versus project management
• How empiricism can help product development
• Metrics for product value
• The role of product management in value management

Section 2: Value Driven Development 

• An overview of value-Driven Development
• How does agile and scrum help value maximization
• Techniques for understanding value and balancing value with emergent product development

Section 3: The Product Owner Role and Scrum 

• Detailed Scrum framework review
• A detailed description of Scrum roles, artifacts, and activities
• Edge cases for using scrum
• Where does the product owner fit in

Section 4: Agile Planing 

• Determining the next product generation a product
• Determining a business model
• Driving a product backlog from a vision
• Value driven backlog creation
• Creating good stories
• Estimating using story point

Section 5: Backlog Management

• Forecasting and tracking fixed feature projects
• Forecasting and tracking fixed time projects
• Using ROI to determine project scope
• Decomposition of work

Section 6: Additional Information and Questions

• Useful books and links on Agile
• Specific questions on agile in context of your organization