You Can’t Have #Agile If You Don’t Have A Customer

In the many pieces I wrote about #Agile being a state of mind not a project management methodology and about the acute need of it becoming the new way of being at work and not merely a new way of work (most of which you can find either on Forbes, on my blog or underneath this article as LinkedIn sorted this mini archive under every newsletter), the underlying assumption has always been that the application is never justifiably reduced to one function of the organization -IT- but that it ought to be the norm for every other one.

Many presume that their type of work, their kind of tasks and the nature of what they do exempts them from ever becoming #Agile. 

This generalized “Agile is lovely but it’s not for X” where “X” refers to Ops, Finance, HR, Marketing or any other functions of an enterprise has become the excuse du jour for those who want to pretend it can be confined to software development. I say “pretend” because they know in their hearts of hearts that it’s a fallacy and in the grand scheme of things, it won’t hold water - once the organization sees the magic of doing things fast with the consumer in mind, they will find ways to have this at every level. 

The stance is, of course, ridiculous and I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had where I’ve asked for concrete examples of the jobs that they have to do that could not be on a Kanban board. Most of those conversations end in an intellectual concession that yes, if one can run their company BBQ, their new branding campaign, their employee engagement (don’t get me started!) project, and their summer body efforts all from the same Trello account then it’s likely that all complex tasks can be done in an Agile fashion. 

As I said, an intellectual concession and not a heart-felt one but we have to start somewhere.

There are several reasons why the mind may embrace #Agile bit the heart takes a while longer. Chief amongst them how gigantic a shift it is from sequential thinking and the effects of that shift in our sense of professional self. The norms and habits we’ve perpetuated in our specific industry challenged, our “experience” unflaunted in long planning debates, our understanding of the sequence of events necessary disrupted and all served on a bed of painfully open communication and eternal state of flexibility and perceived lack of finality. Everything about Agile is uncomfortable to most of us at first.  

How hard it is to transform is compounded by a bigger issue though. Here’s a sine qua non condition of doing anything in Agile that is unavoidable: goodwill. The premise is that things can be done faster, that the order in which things are done is unknown and that no one thing is done unless it is expressly to delight the consumer. This assumes we want to do things fast and for the sake of this consumer. The existence of said goodwill is rightfully debated elsewhere but furthermore, and finally getting to the point of today’s article - this assumes we know who the consumer is. 

I don’t mean that in the esoterical sense of knowing who they really are and having an intimate understanding of what it is that makes them tick but a much more basal question - quid prodes? Of the jobs we have to do, who do we do them for? 

Ironically, this is a question easier answered for IT than other parts of the organization. One can clearly see how the software they made from code to UX affects the people who use it and anchor their #Agile ability in that piece of common sense, irrespective if the software is used by internal or external stakeholders. 

But when you work in procurement or logistics - what common sense applies to being able to imagine what would be your best work to serve your customer and when is the last time you even thought about this mythical customer existing? And when you’re in internal communications - this campaign you’re imagining, is it for the employees you’re talking to or so that they can have a better dialogue to make something for the end consumer? 

When the function you’re part of caters to internal stakeholders in the enterprise, “purpose”, “delight”, “wow the consumer”, “be consumer obsessed” and the like are nothing but buzz words and nebulous concepts imagined by hipster agencies to test your self-control on rolling your eyes or just to drive another nail in the “who even cares?” coffin you sit in all day.  

So my working theory here is that, the main reason why some organizational functions (and leaders for that matter!) can’t make the jump from the theoretical “a-ha! that’s what Agile is, that’s cool” to the practical and invested ways of actually doing it, is because they are basically without a client. 

They can’t put a face to who they do what they do for. They don’t know who this consumer is and when they stop to think about it, it becomes murky whether they are to think of the enterprise end-consumer or their own peers. 

Much as there are ways to create purpose for the supply and demand arm of a steel factory to envision the joy on the face of that kid getting a tricycle (the hipster, urban kind if you will) for Christmas, the reality is that their sourcing of materials is never as clearly purposeful as the drawings of the new model are to the design department. 

The HR department of a pharmaceutical company won’t exactly wake up every morning consumed by a desire to cure cancer, the finance department of oil&gas doesn’t care about making the world a greener place and sales in a payment gateway don’t exactly remember without their software donations wouldn’t flow in to help charities. They don’t exactly have to if they can more readily name what their specific jobs to be done do for their colleagues.

Aside from how every company should find ways to communicate the vision to the end consumer, internal departments should find purpose and fulfillment in making their colleagues their customers. This is, where I think, a servant mentality is insufficiently talked about and wrongly placed with leadership when it applies to us all in every part of the organization.

I think, if we decide to serve - our company’s end-customer if we can see that far, or our department’s beneficiary, or even, our very own team- then we need to do it with the speed and smarts Agile offers. The step towards taking Agile to heart lies in truly understanding whom our customer is, and then thinking about them incessantly. 

This is with multiple caveats, as some functions, in particular, those around sales are insufferably hard to justify as serving anything but the bottom line but if you look around with the view of getting a job done fast to the benefit of someone you hold dear (ideally someone other than yourself but that should do it too) then you’ll stop thinking #Agile is “only for…”

The ideal corollary to follow here and click in the minds of the nay-sayers, is that it’s only if you are devoid of goodwill, don’t really care and ultimately don’t have a customer that you shouldn’t be #Agile. 

It's 2019 - do *you* know who your customer is?