Agile is verge of productive conflict: controlling gap between demand and offer

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
Henry Ford.

Many of us doing Agile do not understand that it is primarily business mindset, rather than just another methodology to deliver software. Balance and sustainability of constructive conflict (key driver of any prosperous business) is the secret sauce to implement Agile successfully.
Let me explain it from practical business perspective. I will drift away from IT and software now…

Imagine you’re running business delivering…. car repair services to your customers.

It is your interest to deliver services fast and having quality in, so that you retain your customers and attract more (as it’s known that satisfied customer may bring 1 or 2 others, while dissatisfied one may stop other 8 coming to you). On one hand the more services you deliver, the more money you get, so you will push for more. But if you start pushing harder than your team is capable of, your service quality will start to suffer and this will obviously cause problems with your customers.

So you will try to get as much as possible given your conditions, while keeping quality in.

Now let us look at it from your customers perspective…

They want to have their car repaired cheap, fast with quality in. When you say your’re busy this week and cannot take their car, they will consider someone else’s services, rather then agree waiting that log (reality of market competition);

So, there is conflict of interests and mismatch between demand and offer.

It drives 2 things:

• Your business development (we need to improve our service to deliver faster/more/cheaper);
• Your customer’s expectations (maybe these repairs are not doable that fast/that much/that cheap);

Two consequences out of that:

• When there is no demand, why should you care to do more/faster/cheaper?
• When there is no chance to change your customers expectations either you’re doing poor job or your customer won’t likely get any better services with reasonable price anywhere else (task for your client managers to drive customer’s expectations).

So mismatch of those two creates conflict of interests that drives change.

The art is to understand to what extent you’re capable to improve things at your business given your current circumstances, while managing your customers expectations in the way to have control over gap between your offer and your customer’s demand.

Controlling this implies another important thing: ability to recognize challenge that you will fail taking (you should constructively resist) and challenge you’re able to overcome (and should take) to improve and continue managing “the gap”.

If you do not understand this you will end up bad. Either you will not be able to deliver quality in to your customers or you will be “beaten” by your competitors. In both cases you will end up being out of business :(.

Now let’s come back from cars to software and Agile

Customer is Product Owner (PO), while your business is your development team. The more you think business-wise and consider your team a business the better your team will be satisfying your PO.

So it is as easy as managing just 2 things:

• Your PO’s expectations;
• You development (quality and predictability);

Agile is just business common-sense mindset, nothing else! So to implement it right start from considering that you run a business in a highly competitive market with goal to satisfy your customer.

And mind that there is difference between pleasing and satisfying your customer, so argue, stand for your point, do not let compromise quality, do never over-commit, protect your ability to deliver, manage expectations, and … satisfy. If you do not follow these simple business rules and will focus on just pleasing your customer (or PO) just as in business you will end up not being able to manage what you’re responsible for – QUALITY.

Good Luck 🙂