The Agile Wilderness: Principle #1: Customer Value

Agile Principle #1: "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." (1)

Image from medium.com (2)

Digging into the agile principle

The focus of this principle is on prioritization of what we work on and making sure we keep the customer at the center of whatever we do. As this has continued to evolve over the last 20 years, we have seen many concepts and ideas spawn from this including but not limited to Design Thinking, Persona/ Empathy Maps, and continuous discovery habits. We now have entire groups of people devoted to customer experience (CX) and continue to look for ways to bring this into every conversation we have about the work we are doing.

I am currently listening to "Continuous Discovery Habits" by Teresa Torres (3) and really enjoying it. This dives into techniques such as customer interviews and opportunity solution trees which allow us to focus on the outcomes we are trying to change for our customer as discussed in Marty Cagan's work around products discussed in the last article. (4)

The second part of the principle is a focus on continuous delivery of value. This is where we see concepts such as minimum viable product (MVP) and DevOps (Development and Operations) come into play. MVP brings in the concept to break the work into small chunks so that we can start to get value to customers sooner and learn from them along the way through minimum viable experiments (MVE).

In order for us to deliver frequently the concept of bringing development and operations together which used to be separate teams allowing us to think differently about how we own and update our system. DevOps brings in concepts around pipelines with automated testing and blue/green deployments. There is a lot in this space and I could write several articles on this but for now, I encourage you to dig in through articles such as this one on DevOps (5) from amazon web services (AWS) if you want to know more.

Comparing the agile principle to Scrum values and SAFe scaled principles

As you look at scrum values (6), you see a continued focus on delivery. We want our teams to have the courage to take on the biggest issues for our customers and confront the constraints with helping us to deliver value quickly with DevOps. To delivery frequently the team is required to focus on the most important work and commit to getting to done.

Within the scaled principles within SAFe (7), you see the focus on customer and frequent delivery continue. Within scaled principle #3, "assume variability, preserve options" dives into the idea discussed earlier about getting to learning early. The idea behind this principle is that we don't know everything up front so we need to assume things will need to change as we learn more. We anticipate this and prepare for adaptation of our solution along the way. Within scaled principle #5, "base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems", we see the concept of an MVP into a scaled environment where we pull work across a working system into a milestone. Lastly the scaled principle #10, "Organize around value" talks about how we organize our teams and bring the focus back to delivering value frequently for our customers.

Suggested changes to the original agile principle

I would recommend changing the wording at the end of the principle from "software" to "product increment".

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable product increments."

As mentioned in my last article (4), there is a large movement to focus on outcomes instead of just output from our teams. We want to make sure we are providing our customers with value not just working software. With this movement, the language we should use here is focused on product and not just software. We also want to continue to talk about doing this in small chunks or increments so that we can learn and adjust to get to achieve the best outcomes for our customers.

Closing

In closing, a key to the agile mindset is a focus on the customer and delivering value as stated in principle #1. Here is a quick summary of the comparisons and changes I would suggest for reference.

I hope you have enjoyed this article and as always feel free to reach out to discuss further or drop a comment below to join the discussion. Thank you for your time and look forward to sharing my thoughts about "Principle #12: retros" next time.

About the Author

Jeff Mortimer?(#theAgileMoose) is an Agile Enthusiast with over 10+ years of experience working in various roles on agile teams including business analyst, product owner, scrum master, team leader, technical delivery manager and now an agile coach consultant focused on product transformations. In additional to his certifications in CBAP, AAC, and CSP-PO, Jeff?has presented at several conferences throughout North America and joined the blogger universe a couple years ago to bring a voice to the everyday agile practitioners. He also just received his Executive MBA at Quantics School of Business and Technology. He is a husband to an amazing intelligent wife who has her doctorate in math education, father to kids who bring him joy every day, friend that brews beer and plays soccer, and citizen who helps organize volunteers to give back to the community.

Follow #theAgileMoose for the latest insights in the agile wilderness.

References

(1)?Agile Principles from agile alliance

(2) Principles Image from medium.com

(3) "Continuous Discovery Habits" by Teresa Torres

(4) The Agile Wilderness: Principle #5: Motivation and Trust

(5) DevOps - AWS

(6)?Scrum Values?from scrum.org

(7)?SAFe Scaled Principles?from scaledagileframework.com