Ask an Agilista
Clients MIA
May 28, 2009
Dear Agilista,
How do we juggle projects to keep a steady workload for our staff when clients randomly go off the grid for a week or more? We’ve tried having “the conversation” (about how we need them to be more responsive, what the consequences might be, etc.), but it keeps happening. Help!
- Agile Rule: Clients are Here or Easily Reachable
Dear ARCHER,
I’m not sure you’re asking the right question. Rather than focusing on improving your juggling act, I’d want to know WHY my clients aren’t being responsive. What do they say when you ask them why they aren’t living up to their share of responsibility? Start by having that conversation, and see what alternatives you can jointly come up with to address the issue. Some product owners have followed an example set by college professors and established regular “office hours”: for example, “Monday and Wednesday I’m available from 8am-9am, and Thursday I’m available from noon-2pm.” Other product owners have simply assigned a proxy to be contacted in their absence. This proxy should have the authority to make decisions about the product, just as the product owner does. Failing to find a workable solution may mean that they simply don’t care about the project. In this case, you either don’t have the right person identified as the product owner, or you shouldn’t be working on the project.
If you’re a software development company creating solutions for others that contract with you, ARCHER, then you have three other puzzle pieces to look at. One is to inspect how you are communicating with your clients in the initial contracting process, because it sounds like the “consequences” you’ve outlined aren’t having the effect you desire. Perhaps your consequences aren’t really much of a dissuasion? A lot has been written on agile contracting, and I’m including some links you may find helpful below. I highly recommend reviewing Jeff Sutherland’s “Money for Nothing” presentation to get ideas around how to add clauses to your contracts that make it clear what the client’s responsibilities are and how you both can profit from using an agile approach to development. Yes, even if you are working with fixed price contracts!
The second puzzle piece for those with external clients who aren’t responsive is to examine whether or not you want them as a client. I know that sounds crazy in this economy, but you really must think about the cost you and your team are incurring. Frustration and over-juggling can lead to burn-out. Constant task-switching can make a team look busy, but when real productivity (delivering working code) is measured, the more task-switching that occurs, the less productive the team is. And there is the lost opportunity cost—you could be signing contracts with clients who are excited to work with you if only you weren’t so busy chasing down the clients who could care less.
Finally, you may want to look at a third piece of the puzzle that may provide a solution for your team: kanban. According to James Shore, “If you’re in an environment where the feature backlog is constantly in flux or hard to predict, particularly if you can release the software on a whim, try the Kanban system.” You can learn more about how limiting work-in-progress (WIP) allows the team to increase throughput by clicking on the links below. But remember: if you have multiple external clients and only one team to do all the work, then someone (perhaps you, ARCHER?) will have to represent all the client interests and be in charge of the prioritization of the work in the queue.
AGILE CONTRACTING LINKS:
http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/2008/08/agile-2008-money-for-nothing.html
From Mary and Tom Poppendieck, who have great articles, presentations etc. on this topic:
http://www.poppendieck.com/righteous.htm (Righteous Contracts)
http://www.poppendieck.com/contracts.htm (Lean Contracts)
http://www.poppendieck.com/pdfs/AgileContracts.pdf (presentation)
http://www.poppendieck.com/agilecontracts.htm (workshop)
Alistair Cockburn has a great page on Agile Contracts here:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Agile_contracts
An open source group working on agile contract templates, including Sutherland’s Money for Nothing and Change for Free:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/agile-contracts-working-group (the article)
http://www.openplans.org/projects/agile-contracts/summary (the group)
KANBAN LINKS (all “intro to kanban”):
http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Kanban-Systems.html
http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/2009/kanban_over_simplified.html
http://leansoftwareengineering.com/ksse/scrum-ban/
http://availagility.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/kanban-flow-and-cadence/
http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/HowtoStartwithKanban.html
http://www.infoq.com/Kanban
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/kanban-for-software (VIDEO)
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet.
Leave a comment
Your email is never published or shared. Required fields are marked *.