The great part about being a chicken for a scrum team, is that you don't have to commit to anything. It's pretty cool... you can get a phone call from someone on the scrum team and say "yea, well your lack of planning doesn't constitute my emergency, so what are you going to do for me?"

"Well, i'm going to kick you right in the balls! How's that sound?"

Ok, but really... how do we collaborate with chickens productively? Because chickens need to know ahead of time (sometimes ridiculously long lead times) to do things for you.

Like: IT server requests, certificate requests, network changes, legal approval, marketing approval.

So you may be asking why aren't these people ON the team?

Good question... why aren't they at your organization?

We frankly can't find enough for them to do to keep them busy 24/7 so we think we can do without them on the team.

I have been trying to get them into sprint planning meetings so we can get their commitment on things before we commit to things that require them (if we know ahead of time that we're going to need them)

Oh crap, another catch 22.

Kinda like how you shouldn't refactor without unit tests but you can't put unit tests in your existing code without refactoring...

Well anyhow...

I don't hate chickens... they can just be a pain to work with some times. We just have to strike a happy balance of planning with chickens so that can participate with us.