Giving customers their legitimate place in software development.

Being really lean means that only that functionality customers use (and are willing to pay for) is developed and released. That means being so agile, that trends and patterns in customer needs/wishes and problems are continuously understood and drive service/product development and delivery.

For this the ‘voice of the customer’ needs to be continuously monitored. The result of the listening is to be analyzed and integrated in the development life cycle (e.g. product backlogs).

As not all new functionality or innovations originate from customers, also the ‘voice of the internal-experts needs to be continuously monitored. This knowledge, experiences and ideas is integrated in the development life cycle as well.

In earlier blogs I wrote in Customer Sensor Networks. Being the same subject, it lacks the natural place in the present developments in agile software development methods. By lack of a better word I use in this blog the term CusDevCus which stands for Customer-Development-Customer. With Development I mean the complete development lifecycle including Marketing, Sales, Product Management, Development, Release and Operations, ect. I am open for any better term.

Core elements of CusDevCus are:

1. Integrated customer feedback (or external expert feedback) into the development life cycle loop to create integrated feedback,. Integrated feedback
   1. is unlimited in size, the larger the amount of participants, the more effective the next release,
   2. gains insight in trends and weak signals for present and future functionality,
   3. is generated in the form of testing developed functionality as well as new (unrelated) ideas.
2. Integrated employee (as internal experts) feedback with the same aspects explained under the integrated customer feedback and
   1. open to all employees, continuously…
3. The feedback combines both quantitative and qualitative information.
4. Each feedback is signified by the feedback provider. This provides navigation through large amount of feedback.
5. The Product Owner analyses the feedback-patterns. The combined quantitative and qualitative information enables both a deep understanding of the explicit functionality-feedback and the high level patterns.
6. Because the feedback is integrated in agile development methods (like Scrum, Kanban, OpenUP, ..) experimentation of new functionality is possible in a semi-real environment using real customers.  This seriously reduces R&D and Sales and Marketing effort and optimizes organizational learning.
7. CusDevCus fully builds on devOps, BusDevOps lean startup and other agile evolutions.
8. CusDevCus is based on open feedback in the form of narratives. That means there are no preformatted testforms or questionnaires for feedback.
9. Of course the open format feedback does not eliminate the need for professional testing!

10. CusDevCus focuses on different user groups. Different user groups have different needs. They reveal different uses (or no use) of functionality.

In my view the above described next step in agile (software) development is a natural one. The main question is whether companies are able to make the mental shift to integrate the customer as described in the software development lifecycle.

Human Sensor Networks

Michael Cheveldave from Cognitive Edge wrote a blog on human sensor networks. It is excellent reading material. This blog contains the highlights of Michael’s explanation, with references to Agile IT development and DevOps.

By changing human sensor networks into customer sensor networks, I merely focus on the application of CSN in IT Agile development life cycles. You may easily argue to keep human sensor networks, as also own employees or other relevant stakeholders provide feedback using the CSN system.

Michael explains the role SenseMaker^® plays in delivering organizations the value of human sensor networks.

… by engaging a large number of people in the process of making sense of their everyday experiences and observations, and allowing meaning to be effectively layered on such experiences we stimulate a network of agents in the systems to make sense of the system themselves.

By integrating different customer groups in functionality definition we will

• easier and sooner understand real customer needs
• build a fruitful relationship with the customer-base
• create pro-active sponsors at the customers of the product
• enable the customer-base to better understand their needs, and innovative possibilities that the organization can provide
• better understand which private betas to be tested by which user group type
• better understand collected quantitative data by means of this qualitative data

… think about how traditional approaches often emphasise the value of external experts or selectively privilege a small team within the company on such strategic decisions.

The decision making process which functionality to build and release

• focusses more quickly to that functionality actually needed by customers
• enables, together with feature flags, different features to be released to different customers types (based on their needs)

Sales and marketing collect valuable information on their targeted customer groups. Information is achieved cheaper, faster and more reliable then based on traditional marketing research.

The approach (a human sensor network AK) allows for the executive team to tap into the distributed cognition, intelligence, scanning, and knowledge of a broader network in a way that effectively informs key strategic decisions.

Reading experiences, ideas and frustrations from actual users, exposes product management, marketing managers and developers to the impact of their initial ideas on what functionality is needed. When well guided, the team will quickly and easily understand existing patterns and needs. Future releases are more effective and efficient.

The ultimate result is a learning organization. People from different organizational silo’s co-interpret and co-decide based on both trends and contextual information. This leads to an organizational wide understanding of and believe in the business goals and opportunities.

Applying customer sensor networks (CSN) in Lean Startup and DevOps teams

The Lean Startup movement addresses the issue to match product functionality to market demand. For this a contextual external customer feedback loop needs to be implemented. A customer sensor network using SenseMaker® provides online, real-time and continuous contextual feedback, closing the feedback loop.

SenseMaker uses an online collector website that lets customers provide feedback by means of narratives. Each narrative gets a title. The customers also provide additional meaning to their narrative. The system categorizes feedback based on the meaning given by the customers. This avoids overhead during analysis for the organization. The SenseMaker analysis software supports the evaluation of the feedback. Enabling effective and short evaluation time. This feedback mechanism enables evaluation of large amounts of feedback from different customer or user groups.

The analysis software provides both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The quantitative aspects provide insight if functionality acceptance level. The qualitative aspects provide deeper insight in innovation opportunities. For example alternative or unforeseen use of the functionality. On the other side of the same scale, the feedback points to a risk or threat. For example that the new functionality is not well accepted by early innovators.

Customer sensor networks integrate with Lean Startup pilot experiments and DevOps private beta’s. It also provides for DevOps implementation the needed internal and external feedback for development. The internal feedback from operations to development is useful in case when the DevOps consists of multiple team in different locations.

CSN makes it possible that for some types of development, product management joins DevOps teams to form ProDevOps. This really reduces overhead and transition costs. It enables a whole new approach to app development in a true Agile manner.

 

SenseMaker is a Cognitive Edge product linking micro-narratives with human sense-making to create advanced decision support, research and monitoring capability in both large and small organisations.