Throughout the years, I've realized that teams are becoming more and more aware of how important is to properly embrace SCRUM. Using proper engineering techniques like continuous integration or automated testing, not disregarding the retrospectives or have effective planning meetings with the customer, are some of the most frequent examples.

Despite all of this, there’s one aspect that I believe it hasn't been properly tackled by most of the teams: The customer engagement in the context of SCRUM. How many times the Product owner shows himself in a planning meeting without knowing exactly what he needs to do or what he should have prepared? How often is customer’s internal communication completely absent, preventing them to agree on the user stories and how they should describe them to the team? These are just some examples that undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of SCRUM , having it unfairly blamed quite often for the failure (or limited success) of the projects.

With this session, I'll share the strategy that I've been using (and recommending) over the last several years to engage a customer. The key focus is to make sure that he's is not only familiarized with the team’s tasks and activities but also with his own tasks.

How many hours does your team (Scrum Master included) spends trying to keep all the data up to date? Burndown and Burnup charts, backlogs, task boards, etc. How easy is for a team member, the product owner or your IT Director to get a glimpse of how's your project going in this precise moment? How many times did the cleaning lady messed up with you stories while cleaning the board?

Enough of excel files, flip charts and post-its to describe and present your work. It's time to move forward and start using software to help you manage your project. 

In this session, I'll demonstrate how the effective use of an integrated software tool to support the SCRUM framework, can significantly improve the productivity of everyone involved in the software development effort.