If the customer isn’t there, did the commitment take place?

So I returned from the Agile 2006 conference charged and ready to go, but aware that I didn’t want to be seen as having ‘wet dog syndrome’.  (Doug Bliss describes this as coming back from a conference, entering the office like a wet dog and sharing your thoughts and ideas in a fast and furious manner like a dog does when shaking its coat to dry off.)  It’s tempting to aggressively share, but should be tempered.

At any rate, one thing that I was sure of was that in an agile environment, it is critical to have open and direct (direct being subjective to the business environment, so maybe the word is ‘effective’) conversations with the appropriate parties in a project when they need to occur. The ability to identify when a conversation should occur, who should be involved and what the topic of the conversation should be is a learned skill. The strength to make sure that conversation takes place is a back bone skill (one has to have the back bone to state unpopular or difficult things at times.) Such was the case with a recent coaching project. The developers had planned out an iteration without the business owner, who also doubles as the end user proxy, in attendance to discuss the screen layout.  The team in question has been working together in the same industry for over eight years, so they have a common understanding and language. They have also had conversations about the features in question with the user proxy in the past, and had been told to ‘do what we discussed when we looked at the other products available’.

You know where this is going….   Midway through the iteration, the business owner\user proxy finally weighed in after seeing the initial efforts and  added a number of features that weren’t discussed by the team until this point, and weren’t included in the original iteration plan.  Needless to say, they didn’t make their iteration goal.  It was apparent to me that we needed to have a conversation.  The business owner wasn’t making the project planning and review meetings a high enough priority.  Going back to my reflections above, I took the business owner aside after the iteration review and explained that the development team can’t be held accountable if they don’t meet goals that aren’t defined.  If they wanted to get the project moving as quickly as possible; and everyone does, then everybody needs to take part in the iteration planning and review.  Everyone has to agree what the commitment is.

Looking back on it, it wasn’t a negative conversation and it wasn’t a personal attack on the business owner. It was simply sharing an unsolicited observation based on my experiences.  The simple fact that I’m involved in the project and part of the team compels me to do what I can to make the team better.  After the conversation with the business owner, the team as a whole had a similar conversation.  It helped reinforce the importance of committing to a set of features for an iteration as well has defining what those features are (and are not.)