It’s true that your largest stakeholder is your customers – and where I work, we have direct access to all of them through our Company’s Forums. In a later blog I’ll talk about Ideas Management but today I got to use my Community Skills for the good of our Agile Process.
You see, our communication hasn’t always been the best, and I think as people become more knowledgeable – it’s becomes difficult to teach without using tech slang. Well I am currently a newbie, so it was a natural decision to post on Agile, Scrum and Beyond as I’m learning too. To bring our Community on the journey with me, with a goal of great collaboration.
Today’s article for members was on the first Agile Principle;
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
Which ironically writing it felt a little like a test to see if I had been paying attention this last two months.
- I gave some stats on our Company’s delivery (14 Releases, implementing 377 changes in the last 18 months) to help put our work and ‘Continuous Delivery’ into perspective.
- I talked about my lack of understanding on what ‘Early’ meant “It conjured associated words like ‘incompleted, messy, unusable, basic’.“ Something I know our customers would go through that same thought process and be concerned about.
- I gave some real world examples of incremental releases on some of our products, to help the concept along and then spoke about the benefits of early, continuous releases in bullet points.
- Finally I posted a call to action – that our release notes aren’t just an update – they are there for feedback, to be challanged and for change to come from our customers.
The response to these threads (and I’ve only done two so far) has been phenomenal. I’ve always enjoyed unveiling more and more of the company to our members.
This is one straight from an email;
“1) That you have a dev process with customer input built into it is, itself, remarkable and laudable
2) That you are writing about it so eloquently, with such a deft tone
is a tribute to your rare talent both as a communicator in general and a
community expert in particular
3) The content and tenor of the customer responses – even those with
gripes – shows what a special place your company has managed to achieve in
their lives. And that only happens when they have people like you
interacting with them over a long period of time.
4) You know how to use a semi colon. There aren’t many of us left“
I think it’s totally natural for someone to see Release Notes, and assume that what has been released is a ‘final product’. It is easy to be critical of this final product and urge about changes when things aren’t right with it. If our Customers understand our mindsets, and how we release r.e. MVP’s and incremental improvement – they’ll know we’re ready and waiting, we’re prepared for their feedback and to act on that quickly. Criticism becomes collaboration. Joint understanding means we’re on the same side.
Scrummastery 