It’s not uncommon for an organisation’s ‘mission, vision & values’ to include a set of core elements, and then to see an aspect covering customer relations. This brief post focuses on the “customers” element and how an IT change department benefits from a modern view of this relationship.
Expressions such as “the customer is always right” or “the customer is king” are familiar, however in our modern complex environment, these concepts are outdated and outmoded. This is reflected in a more modern vision where we find the customer relationship described as one more like that between trusted friends.
Trusted friends are on equal terms and is a relationship based on respect; seeing each other ‘eye to eye’. If such a friend were taking some false step, a friend with the authority of expertise, would look to readjust their thinking; even having to “just say ‘no’ when necessary”. As a practical application of this principle, an example might be a demand to skip adequate testing during delivery; whereas we would need to help our customer to see the danger of building technical debt.
Rather than being exclusively ‘delivery focussed’ we offer our customer a mature long term point of view; in effect we offer a service of ‘strategic technical conscience’.
A quote from George MacDonald sums this up well: “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”
A crucial aspect of the ‘trusted friend’ customer relationship is understanding them. We must do all we can to know our customer. Once we have a reasonable understanding of the complexity they face and the priorities they have, we must help them to understand our similar challenges. These of course include a strategy of producing robust and extensible software.
A powerful way to facilitate the mutual understanding is to employ a methodology rather than continuing an informal ad-hoc development approach. Agile for discrete projects or Lean techniques for more business-as-usual change, afford opportunity for bi-lateral engagement; understanding and sharing priorities, concerns and constraints.
In short, IT can and should be a trusted friend to our customer, and this in many cases requires us to re-evaluate our behaviour.
I couldn’t agree more. Agile methodologies *are* the modern vision for an increasingly pragmatic world. A trusted relationship will build long-term win-win relationships with clients but requires constant courage, being the extreme programming values a good place to start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming#courage)
While gathering requirements saying “no” is indeed necessary sometimes, while still being something so problematic to say, so “sweeteners” may be useful. A possible low-level idea is to clearly classify priorities as ABC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#ABC_analysis) It will put requirements in the A bucket – functionality that must be delivered, B – nice to have or easy to do tasks(colours or other aesthetic changes are usually belittled but have such a deep impact in user experience) and C – items that break the design or the GUI or are not really necessary. In practice releases in agile iterations will naturally be delivered with all As, most Bs and no Cs. The customer will quickly get the message when something is classified as C, still seeing the relationship as honest and assertive but in a non-violent way
Comment by Tony — 2011-11-16 @ 0:20
Hi David,
I agree. I think the most balanced and healthy relationship between the customer and the vendor is that of friendship and the ensuing trust. The slave/master or master/slave relationship may also work, but cannot be sustained.
Comment by PM Hut — 2011-11-16 @ 10:38