One organization I have worked with received a relatively large contract. The contract stipulated a highly-customized version of off-the-shelf software. Once work began on this contract, the dev team and myself found that the level of customization required necessitated much more rapid and frequent feedback from the customer. Up to this point, we didn’t involve the customer except maybe once a quarter. Our flawed thinking was that they didn’t want to be that involved.
As our quarterly check-ins with the customer rolled on, we found that we were often missing the requirements mark for the customer. At this point, I decided to do something that the organization had not yet tried: we on-boarded the customer as a member of our team. This meant that while they were several states away, they attended our daily stand-ups - reporting as if they were a member of the team - they attended our sprint plannings, retrospectives, and release planning meetings. In addition to attending our retrospectives, we added another post-sprint meeting catered specifically for the customer in which we demonstrated the work we had done the prior sprint. By making the customer a member of the team, we were likewise able to access them throughout our sprints, further ensuring our post-sprint demos were more demo than corrective feedback session.
The results were phenomenal. We reduced our overall development time by 33% (comparative throughput modeling), cutting out design guess work and, by extension, subsequent rework.
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