How to involve the end user
My customer - large industrial company - does great using Scrum at the engineering level. However, they do not profit from Scrum as they could since they cannot involve the end user:
1.) A strong product management is shielding the end user from direct access using traditional upfront and document driven requirements engineering.
2.) The end user is not interested/not used to provide feedback. Despite several and personal invitations they are not attending the Sprint Reviews. The end user are very busy on their daily job and they do not get the features currently in development for at least another year.
Solutions are on the hand. But I'm seeking especially for similar situations and practically applied solutions.
Dani,
I don't know if this would work for your org, but I saw one team who gave out gift cards to customers who came and participated in sprint reviews. I think that these customers participated on their own time(i.e. not "company time"). I have no idea if something similar would work for you or not. Maybe provide dinner just after work and do it after hours?
Best of luck!
Hi Daniel,
My client is building products for service providers. They have similar situation as yours.
Instead of Sprint Reviews, they scheduled the feedback session into the project deep-dive meeting with "key" customers. The feedback would be discussed and prioritized by the product manager. This has helped them to address lots of last-minute must-have requirement changes. The other thing we tried was to identify the "key" stakeholder/customer, who was actually responsible for the success of deploying the product/project. That person is usually interested in the progress and usefulness of the product
How your team deals the situation?
-Candi