Best practices for customer involvement in Agile development?

Question

We need to involve our customer development partners in our development process. We're more or less following Agile methodologies. Some customer partners are remote, others closer. We need to minimize travel costs.

Our customers are in health care and tend to be busy, expensive, and hard to schedule.

What practices and technologies have worked to support customer involvement? We're using phone calls, phone conferences and email. We're curious about leveraging wiki techniques and would love to hear what's worked for others.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Just a few ideas:

If you do choose to use a Wiki, make sure it supports a whole-wiki-wide "recent changes" list, and preferably one that is specific to the users. The less distant from development people are, the more likely to have email as a metaphor for their computer use. If they can't immediately tell when there's something new for them to see, they will never explore it. You also preferably need ways to signal to them that you need their attention to matters, or they will treat changes like CCs.

I'm a big believer in creating video screen captures of interactions (narrated) and distributing them to users. Unlike a real demo, customers don't feel like they need to interrupt, and they can rewind and re-watch the same interaction over and over, paying attention to little details.

Finally, if you do distribute prototypes, make sure to send someone (or at least a screen sharing session) to see how the prototypes are used. Contextual design is effective. You can count on people using your prototype differently from the way you expect, and you have to understand how they use it to really understand where the issues are, even if they don't report them.

Answer 2

Have you considered something like LogMeIn.

This would allow customers to either log-in to a PC on your network already running your application, or alternatively allow you to install/update the application on one of their computers.

This would solve the remote customer issue and would also support the ongoing continual customer feedback requirement in the agile process.

I used it a previous company for technical support, but there is no reason (except maybe cost) that it would not work for your situation.

It is also a great way to actually see how users are using your application and therefore find out what works and what doesn't.

Answer 3

First of all, make sure that you have a product manager or a product owner close the the developers. This person will be managing the relationship with the customer.

Then, the product manager can demonstrate the product to the customer at the end of each iteration and also ask customers question when the developer need feedback to implement a user story.

It is amazing the positive feedback you can get from customers when you involve them.

We did not use a wiki and most of the communication is done via E-Mail, phone, and a screen sharing application (we are using GoToMeeting, but there are tons of alternative out there).

Answer 4

it doesn't matter whether the customer is in the same cubicle or halfway around the planet, except for communication delays - the critical factor is availability.

a customer that is too busy to answer your emails for several days is going to cause your iteration to be late, or fail

the customer has two critical commitments for agile:

1. available to answer questions in a timely manner
2. not to change their mind/priorities during an iteration

the customer must commit to a reasonable service-level agreement (SLA) on availability, e.g. 1-hour response time, or 24-hour response time, etc., and you will need to adjust all estimates and schedules by the lag factor. If the customer will not commit or does not follow through, cancel the iteration and re-plan, bringing the customer's commitment to the forefront again. Do not just "guess" at what you think the customer might want.

Bottom line: without a customer commitment, agile will not work.

Answer 5

You should probably do a kick-off once with everyone at one place. Face-to-face time is invaluable. That includes all developers. Prepare some metaplan questions, but also have enough time to just mingle.

Answer 6

One option: Install a customer proxy at the "customer partner" site who can extract the information that you need when those customers are available. Have these proxies build the solid relationships that allow them to represent the customer view. Their time is all yours. And when questions arise that they cannot answer, they have ready access to your customer partners - even if in the coffee line.

Answer 7

The whole point of the customer in agile is to have open and free discourse with the developers (IE immediate feedback). If your actual customers cannot provide this, then you need an intermediary/proxy that can fill this role. You don't need actual customers, you just need someone that can represent the customers' interests well enough to meet your customers' needs.

Answer 8

My experience with Agile methods is mostly for desktop applications. When our customers are remote, we've spent time to get an engineer to the customer site to configure/install a demo rig. The engineer works with the customer on a test and demo setup/plan that will provide an environment that the customer believes replicates the important aspects of the deployment environment but isolates the demo system from existing infrastructure (so that we can push updates whenever we need to). The engineer also sets up deployment systems to move our applications into production, so that we can "deploy" without being on site. Our applications can self-update (either for each release or each build) and we carefully instrument the releases to log all errors and submit all crashes as bugs to our bug tracker. This way we at least know what went wrong, even if we don't know what's going right.

For each release/build that shows up on the customer's test rig, we provide a (short) screencast, narrated by the project lead or primary developer, demo-ing any new features. The release notes contain any long-term issues or questions we want the customer to think about (i.e. issues that can't be resolved immediately by a phone call or email), and the application displays these notes for the user.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, we get the customer and/or the customer's liaison an account on our calendar server and configure their calendar app to make use of that account. This then goes both ways--we can schedule time (on site, phone, email, etc.) with the customer and they can do the same with our developers.

Answer 9

I think by most definitions of Agile processes that have high dependence on customer involvement you've already missed "best practice", which would be for an on-site, and preferably "in-team" customer present at all times. So I suppose we're looking for a "next-best practice". :)

There's the possibility of introducing a "proxy customer" on-site. I have to admit to being very sceptical about the value of a proxy customer. I'm concerned about the risk of introducing some sort of second-rate and otherwise unnecessary business analyst function to the mix, with the increased signal-to-noise ratio and potential for garbled messages. It also carries the risk of allowing busy real customers to reduce their involvement in the process, which is likely to lead to dissatisfaction. I wonder if there might be someone with good domain knowledge who has recently retired and might be available to act in this capacity as a consultant?

Communication bandwidth with remote customers is astonishingly lower than face-to-face, something I had not fully realised until I started dealing with users in another country. Even with video the loss is significant.

How long are your iterations? How hard is planning iterations? Might it be easier to go for longer iterations and get more planning done less frequently, or reduce iteration length and go to smaller, but more frequent planning sessions? Are more than one customer involv

Do you have a useable and available build at the end of each iteration? Is there time for involved users to have hands-on time before the next planning session? Keeping users engaged by shipping frequently would seem on the surface to be a Good Idea, which perhaps legislates for small frequent iterations (a week? two weeks?)

The wiki idea might work: have you looked at the FIT Framework? It's a sort of integrated acceptance test/wiki, which might help in getting acceptance tests from remote customers. I think I'd also look to provide some sort of (separate or integrated) "project dashboard", possibly pushed regularly to key customers as well as available on demand. use it as a substitute for things like post-its on whiteboards, Big Visible Charts and the like. There are a number of open-source or low-cost options that may serve - writing your own simple alternative need not be too time-consuming or costly, either.

Above all, remember that "Agile" is a kind-of catch-all label for developments that are carried out with an emphasis on the values and principles espoused in the Agile manifesto. What is considered "best" in one situation may not be so in another. If you understand the principles and regularly review your methods with a critical eye then you're probably going to be close enough to the best practice application to your situation.

I haven't looked at it for some time but with Beck and Fowler on the author list, there should be something useful in Planning Extreme Programming.