That is quite a problem, especially since the product owner should ideally be someone with a vested interest in the product, which sort of implies that you cannot use a consultant as a ersatz product owner. Unless you intend to keep the consultant on for basically forever.
I has the luxury of working with a good product owner once. We recruited him for the task at hand, so he had no background in the organization doing nothing other than his PO duties. This turned out to be a great boon, and managed to avoid the usual pitfalls of developer-turned-PO or boss-also-doing-PO.
I believe the problem lies in the difficulty of fully grokking the project owner role. It's nontraditional and not very glamorous.
Department heads are not product owners. In fact, I am a firm believer that being in any way responsible for staff is generally incompatible with the product owner role.
In all honesty, the best factor to succeed is to have good people in the team. If you don't have that, you are never really going to get past that factor.
Provided you have that, I believe the greatest success factors are outside of the scum team and that the effort to improve working conditions should be concentrated there.
Though I'd love the idea of a methodology race, where the fittest win. Wonder if there ever is an organization open minded enough to try this...
This is very accurate. As a Swede going to visit the US, a country which I love dearly, the last summer my main fear was filling out forms incorrectly or the airports security procedure. And Sweden is more or less a total ally to America, if unofficial, and a major trading partner. It's hard to find someone less threatening than a Swedish citizen.
Which really is a shame, because in general Americans are a friendly bunch of people.
Yes, it's absolutely in the same vein, though Piglet is intended for smaller uses than using for full languages. I was gunning for a small tool that's easy to use an easy to integrate, and with the coolness factor and useabilty that fluency gives you.
I has the luxury of working with a good product owner once. We recruited him for the task at hand, so he had no background in the organization doing nothing other than his PO duties. This turned out to be a great boon, and managed to avoid the usual pitfalls of developer-turned-PO or boss-also-doing-PO.