Leveraging Collaborative Tools with Distributed Customer Teams
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Add to calendarOne of the core values of the Agile Manifesto is favoring “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. Unfortuntely, product companies with thousands (to millions!) of customers can find collaborating with their customers nearly impossible, as few tools exist to explicitly support meaningful customer collaboration. This workshop explores the advantages of including your customers as part of your distributed team and some of the tools that are emerging to enable agilists to better collaborate with their customers. Bring your laptop, as we may be trying out some of these tools.
I think learning outcomes are best accomplished by making workshops as interactive and hands-on as possible. However, I also understand that we may not have the right infrastructure for allowing participants to try out the tools that will be presented. As such, I’m preparing for a flexible session format.
15 min: PPT introduction to the concept of including your customer 15 min: overview of tool frameworks and some examples of each 10 min: interactive demo as conditions allow 5 min: Q&A / wrap-up
I will try to continue to leverage the Agile planning onion in the hopes that a common framework will help us understand where and how we can better collaborate with customers.
The workshop will continue to focus on tools that enable distributed teams to:
- Identify “epics” and other “large” product enhancements that relate to the product roadmap (ideation)
- Identify release themes (ideation)
- Prioritize backlogs (decision making)
- Estimate work (decision making)
A hands-on experience will require free wireless internet. I’ll show screen shots of tools if we can’t leverage a hands-on experience.
- A framework for identifying and classifying tools that enable customer team collaboration
- Examples of specific tools that exist within this framework
- Practical experience in choosing tools that enable collaboration
- Guidance in when in-person vs. online tools are appropriate for various communication goals
