Focus On Customer-Team Relationship
Focus On Customer-Team Relationships
We need to be aware of the quality of the relationships between our teams and the customers. Where we observe excellent collaboration we can leave the relationship to evolve over time. Where we observe imbalanced or deteriorating relationships we should seek sufficient forewarning to allow us to encourage the parties to change behaviour. In the worst cases we may need to intervene to improve the situation before relationships breakdown completely.
In A Nutshell
The long-lasting relationships we seek between our customers and high-performing teams require nurturing. We normally rely on the mutual trust between the customer and team to sustain these relationships for extended time periods. But every relationship will have its ups and downs. We need to be aware of the changing nature of the relationship so that we can stimulate corrective action when we observe a decline in collaboration and good will.
We expect the rigour and discipline of the team to be transparent about any problems arising with the customer. We hope that our customers will share this transparency - but we cannot rely on this because the customer is governed by their own culture, values and principles.
There is often a desire to work with the customer beyond the day-to-day relationship with the team. We may have ambitions to develop and deepen the relationship with the customer in a strategic way. Other customer centred activities can provide useful alternative channels to review the quality of team and customer relationships.
When we identify that there has been a breakdown in relationships that we have been unable to prevent, we need to examine why the breakdown has occurred. Are there opportunities we can identify to recover the relationship? Are the lessons we need to learn in order to prevent similar breakdowns in the future.
Practices
Customer Relationship Review
Blameless Post-Mortems are adopted as part Google’s Site Reliability Engineering framework. The concept has existed for sometime as part of traditional Service Operations. Its use within SRE shows its adoption in "DevOps” too. In this context, post-mortems are used to analyse the causes of operational failures and to decide how to improve the situation.
Teams plan work to fill their short-term planning horizon. With a clear understanding of current priorities and the capacity of the team, work items are chosen to satisfy the forthcoming delivery goals. The team elaborates the plan as necessary to ensure that there is a shared understanding of the work that is required.
The Sprint Retrospective is a Scrum event. Its purpose is to allow the team to inspect and adapt its way of working, the functioning of the team, the working context and all other factors which may impact the team’s ability to deliver its goals. Some factors the team have direct control over, other factors will require external influence to change.
