Agile principles of customer satisfaction

Agile approaches focus on customer satisfaction, which makes sense. After all, the customer is the reason for developing the product in the first place.

While all 12 Principles support the goal of satisfying customers, principles 1, 2, 3, and 4 stand out for me:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

      You may define the customer on a project in a number of ways:

      In project management terms, the customer is the person or group paying for the project.

      In some organizations, the customer may be a client, external to the organization.

      In other organizations, the customer may be a project stakeholder or stakeholders within the organization.

      The person who ends up using the product is also a customer. For clarity and to be consistent with the original 12 Agile Principles, in this book, I call that person the user.

 

How do you enact these principles? Simply do the following:

      Agile project teams include a product owner, a person who is responsible for ensuring translation of what the customer wants into product requirements.

      The product owner prioritizes product features in order of market value or risk and communicates priorities to the development team. The development team delivers the most valuable features on the list in short cycles of development, known as iterations or sprints.

      The product owner has deep and ongoing involvement throughout each day to clarify priorities and requirements, make decisions, provide feedback, and quickly answer the many questions that pop up during a project.

      Frequent delivery of working product features allows the product owner and the customer to have a full sense of how the product is developing.

      As the development team continues to deliver complete and demonstrable features every eight (ideally, four) weeks or less, the value of the total product grows incrementally, as do its functional capabilities.

      The customer accumulates value for his or her investment regularly by receiving new, ready-to-use product features throughout the project, rather than waiting until the end of what might be a long project for the first, and maybe only, delivery of releasable product features.