Archive for the ‘agile’ Category
Does the customer know what they can get?
I really enjoyed watching this InfoQ post on “A Customer’s Perspective of an Agile Team” because its good for people for like us, people who build stuff, to keep an eye on how we are perceived by our customers.
The timing of this talk was spooky for me. Recently, I’ve been running a number of internal projects where I’m the customer. As the customer, it was the first time I was beaten across the head with the agile developer’s weapon of choice - cutting scope. When the developers unleash this weapon of mass destruction, it’s typically on customers who don’t know what they want. We say, “Those silly customers, they are always changing requirements. They never know what they want.”
Luckily, because I have a little bit of technical knowledge, I was able to articulate my requirements in a different way so that the team understood (still not the right way round, because the dev team should be trying to understand it in business terms, so stuff to work on there I suppose). I was able to do this because I pretty much knew what I could get from technology. However, consider a real, non-technical customer. Just put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Here you’re expected to communicate business value and features, to a team to implement, but you don’t have a damned clue about what you can or can’t get from technology. Furthermore, the team responsible for deriving business value from technology do not really understand the business, or communicate in business terminology. Instead the dev team break things down into technobabble.
Now of course this scenario never occurs, right? But humor me. The next time you find yourself in the situation where you’re cursing the customer, ask yourself, is this because they don’t know what they want or that they don’t know what they can get? If its the latter, its your job to inform them.
Also, when you say to the customer, sorry but you’re just going to have to cut scope, be sympathetic, because what your actually telling the customer is that they cannot get what they need. And as Alexia alluded to in the talk, when cutting scope is not an option, this is the place where creative solutions can be found. But if the agile scope cutting hatchet man is allowed to chop without challenge, these creative solutions will never be explored and customers never get what they need. Let’s not go there…