We are usually torn between building more “product” or satisfying the “customer”.
Prioritize Customer (maintaining product)
Fix and release to save the world
Prioritize Product (building more product)
Plan and build to a schedule
When you focus on product, you have a certain “amount” of product that needs to be built within a sprint (time box); you can plan for fixes by leaving some room for the defect backlog, but features come first – then come fixes, and the work is usually fixed where people know what they are working on for the sprint. In this scenario most will usually package after the sprint is over (test and release)
When you focus on customer, you have to fix and get the fix out the door ASAP. Priority is given to the most critical fix and/or customer and things will be packaged (test and release) as soon as appropriate and/or possible.
Some solve this by having a sustaining engineering team, but who really wants to only fix defects?; others use a mix of cross-functional or functional teams and adjust as needed, but this can be disruptive.
If you chose to “adjust as needed” (be agile) you will introduce some chaos every now and then but this can be minimized by having “plan of action”. How you adjust as needed and what type of “plan of action” you need also depends on what type of process you follow and what your focus is; is your culture focused on product? or is your culture focused on the customer? Depending on whom you ask (their role) within an organization, you may get different answers.
If you follow “Scrum” then your work queue is mostly “push” defined, where work is planned and pushed into a sprint/iteration before its worked on.
If you follow “Kanban” then your work queue is mostly “pull” defined, where work is pulled and worked on.
In an ideal world, one would have a process that allows the focus on both, the product and the customer. A process that allows you to “build what you say you will build” but also allow you to focus on “what is important right now”; such a process would mix Scrum and Kanban, giving you, ScumBan. The idea of a Scrumban is not new; there are books and many talks/posts regarding this. How Scrum and Kanban are merged together depend on the person who is cross-breeding the processes and what problem(s) they are trying to solve; I named my implementation “RAPID” for “Real-time Actionable Prioritized Individual Delivery”.
In my next post around RAPID, I will go over some examples that helped define the how and why behind RAPID and how it would be used in a team that wants to focus on both, the product and the customer.
Tagged: agile SDLC, customer vs product, customer vs stateholder, focus on customer, focus on product, focus on stakeholder, kanban, process, Process improvement, rapid, scrum, scrunban, SDLC, team building
