Week Ending 20th January 2023

What’s New This Week?

Taking a spoonful of our own medicine, we have started to shape our roadmap of priorities for anAgileMind. It’s public on Trello. Feedback is welcomed.

New Content

Focus On Commitments

The basis of trust between the customer and team is the making and fulfilling of mutual commitments. The customer commits to open discussion of needs and to accept challenge from the team in order to reach a shared understanding of those needs. The team commits to priorities and to delivery.

Focus On Influencing The Customer

The team must be able to exercise influence over the customer in its role of trusted advisor. When the customer brings unrealistic expectations over the rate of delivery or of potential solutions the team uses its influence, supported with data and other information, to change those expectations. The customer, in turn, must be open to being influenced by the team in its role of trusted advisor.

Focus On Effective Interaction

To sustain an effective relationship with the customer, we need to ensure that our interactions are effective. Openness and transparency are essential from both sides. Willingness to offer and accept feedback and to act on that feedback is crucial to a successful, long-term, trusting relationship between the team and the customer.

Focus On Voice Of The Customer

To be customer led means to listen to the customer about their needs and priorities. We avoid getting into situations where we are “telling the customer”. Being trusted partners we offer guidance and advice, but we are still fundamentally led by the customer’s voice.

Focus On Experimenting

When our customers’ needs are unclear or even in conflict with other needs we need to help the customer achieve a resolution. Our focus is on using experiments to quickly clarify and resolve the customers’ real need. We collaborate with the customer to define the experiments we need, the order in which they will be performed. We also define how we can exit the experiment process when our data provides sufficient confirmation of our hypotheses.

Refined Content

Customer Led

At all times we focus on the customer. We collaborate to understand their needs and priorities. We continually seek feedback on our work as it is completed. We share a set of priorities that will enable us to maximise the value we deliver to our customer. Priorities are expressed and shared through our roadmaps and through the collaborative ways of working we foster.

New Article

Damian writes about the importance of the Team Charter and its role in creating trust within the team.