This is 'me rant' about the Software/hardware and Business people relationship (from a narrow perspective)
Software/Hardware engineers are event driven. They are the beloved folks that make things out of nothing... well.. with the help of IntelliSense (for us lazy ppl), almost out of nothing... They are always focused at the task at hand and not so much on the time. Every now and then the humble (some ain't so much) PM/SrumMaster/Product Owner would venture out of the hole (i.e. fancy office) to check up on the work being done and understand and clear obstacles where needed.
Then you have the other side. Business people. They are time driven. We all love them.. (sorta). After all, they have the all mighty dollar! They want things done now, noW, nOW, NOW! they are always focused at the task at large and not so much on the gritty details. They are focused on time. Similarly, the humble PM/SrumMaster/Product Owner would undertake the perilous journey (thank you thesaurus) and interact with them to identify and help everyone keep what needs to be done simple and organized (Dont quote this you Masters of Scrum)
So what is the best way to bride those two groups??? Meet "Super wo/men" aka "Product owner" and ScrumMaster (Dah, I already mentioned them twice). Lets start with the owner. So what is this hero's role. Well in simple terms, organizing what is important and what is not (i.e. backlog/Task List). That it. nothing to it. right?.... WRONG!!!. Just imagine how many opinions the poor sucker ... I mean ... person will have to go through. This person understands and gets what the business needs and wants. And all this need to be passed along to the development team, they give the magic estimate, and runs back to the business folks with "Ok, so now I can do this, that and those, but these, have to be left to next 2 weeks" ... "and oh, here, I got you cupcakes and muffins" and then run away (As if muffins and cupcakes go together... heresy I say!!)
You have all this while the other hero ScrumMaster is running around and duct taping every problem. (Duct tap is awesome....) For every problem there is a solution. This person will have to be able to pickup the pieces of every disaster and make it into a 'bump on the road', in or out of the iteration.
So where does that bring this conversion to... not sure.. everyone is needed. There are no real heroes. you remove one role and the whole things goes back to old school chaos. So I'm going to just going to end it n..n...now.
(I love Duct tap)
