The Customer Role in Agile Projects
This workshop is aimed at exploring and understanding the customer role on Agile projects. It will answer several common questions about this role, like: What’s an agile customer? What’s the role of the agile customer? Why is this role so important? Is the agile customer one person or a team? What traits should a agile customer have? Why does the role break down? There will be a highly interactive breakout session that will bring different perspectives on the topic from the participants experience and tries to deepen the understanding of this important issue.
The goals of the breakout session
Asking the team to explicitly sequence these activities accomplishes several goals:
• It gives the team a better understand how the customer role fits in the big picture of the agile process.
• It gives everyone on the team a better appreciation of the customer role in the project.
• It causes the whole team to think about what is the underlying goal of each activity in order to put it in a specific order.
• Teams realize that there are many activities that their current teams aren’t doing.
• It gives everyone on the team a better understanding of what Agile activities need to happen in the release / iteration lifecycle.
• Participants will learn new ideas from the other participants experiences.
Tentative outline:
• 5 minutes: speaker introductions
• 15 minutes: presentation to discuss and answer common questions around the agile customer role.
• 45 minutes: Exercise - Teams sequence index cards that have predefined set of agile activities in the order that they occur during the agile iterative lifecycle
• 10 minutes: discussion about the experience of the exercise
• 15 minutes: presentation on how the rest of the team can get involved to help the agile customer be successful