At last night’s meetup we spoke through various roles and challenges when working in an Agile environment. We formed groups with strangers and did our best to remain friendly at 8pm without food or booze.

We discussed various agile principles, including the manifesto.

The Agile Manifesto

The Agile manifesto is made up of 12 principles. Our discussion revolved around one in particular.

“Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”

We reacted to this with two emotions. Hatred. Hope.

  • Hatred: because last minute changes are frustrating.
  • Hope: because it’s great that people are keen to use the product.

I woke up this morning with a graph in my head.

How can you tell if your customer actually cares?

It’s strange to say it, but some people pay for a product and don’t really care if it actually works. You would think people worry about wasting money, but that just isn’t the case in many large scale projects.

Here’s how you can tell if your customer cars. – You know what they look like. – You’ve met them. – They call you with interesting ideas and changes. – They come in with late requirements. – They test your work.

How can you tell if YOU care?

If you enjoy the end to end process of your job. You care about your customers. You see yourself as a professional who takes pride in getting the detail right. You feel supported.

The perfect project

Our Agile meetup was fascinating. Another interesting question was raised.

“Think about the worst project you’ve worked on? [pause – think] Think about the best project you’ve worked on? [pause – think]. What makes up the perfect project?

We discussed. This is what we came up with:

  • A sense of high business value from the organisation in the product or service being developed.
  • A simple clear focus set down for all members of the team.
  • Keen customer engagement. Real world customer who care.
  • Everyone in the team learned something significant along the way.