Sev­eral foun­da­tional aspects of agile project man­age­ment focus on the role of the Cus­tomer. The role is of course best-​​defined in the con­text of work-​​for-​​hire, or con­sult­ing, or even in places where the team is doing vol­un­teer work in an Open Source set­ting for a spec­i­fied Main­tainer. And his­tor­i­cally this makes sense.

In the early days, I remem­ber a lot of peo­ple in soft­ware projects would con­flate the Cus­tomer with the User, even when they weren’t the same per­son. And then of course there’s the (risky?) con­fla­tion of Cus­tomer with Bill-​​payer, or (maybe more dan­ger­ous?) Cus­tomer with Project Owner (in a Scrum sense). But those are known prob­lems, and the agile coach­ing com­mu­nity seems to have han­dled them rea­son­ably well—in the con­text of tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional settings—if noth­ing else by repet­i­tive correction.

The trou­ble I’ve found recently is how often the term puts off explor­ers, those who are tempted or solicited to try an “agile for one” (or “agile for us”) approach to their inves­ti­ga­tory work—the just-​​try-​​it-​​and-​​see-​​what-​​happens projects that fill our days as engi­neers, sci­en­tists, artists and Mak­ers more gen­er­ally. To some extent the prob­lem is the word and the freight it car­ries, and the diverse lan­guages and cul­tures of from which those folks come, and the cul­tural antipa­thy preva­lent between com­mu­ni­tar­ian life-​​of-​​the-​​mind folks and doing-​​it-​​for-​​the-​​money folks.

I know, hav­ing spent so much time among the uppity agile rebels, that this “Cus­tomer” can be you, or all of you together (as long as you can arrange to Speak with One Voice), or nobody in par­tic­u­lar. I under­stand that the point of the role is some com­bi­na­tion of (1) iden­ti­fy­ing the most valu­able thing to deliver next so you can focus on that and deliver it next, and (2) avoid­ing the Mis­sion Creep and Babbage’s Dis­ease that keeps projects from ever deliv­er­ing any­thing of use at all, and (3) learn­ing the (sur­pris­ingly rare) skill of Not Pro­duc­ing Unin­tel­li­gi­ble Crap.

But the word itself, and the freight it car­ries, seems to put off people—not least stu­dents and other academics—who I have to say are among the most “at risk” for fail­ing to ship any use­ful work at all, ever. The deep use­ful­ness of the Cus­tomer con­cept, as far as I’m con­cerned, is that some­body ought to be able to dynam­i­cally and adap­tively sort the many things you might do next into an ordered list that reflects cur­rent per­cep­tion of value.

To me, “being Cus­tomer” in my projects—whether I’m doing open-​​ended research or tar­geted soft­ware development—is a vis­ceral change I make in my beliefs, desires and inten­tions. If I’m sort­ing sto­ries or plan­ning the next day or week, I try to look not at the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences I’ll have when mak­ing progress and doing work, but instead at the value I expect (right then) to obtain from the state­ment of pur­pose each story rep­re­sents. It doesn’t mat­ter than I’m the Cus­tomer and the “Devel­op­ment Team” on cer­tain projects, as long as I can dif­fer­en­ti­ate the stance I take when mak­ing deci­sions in those two roles. It doesn’t mat­ter that the “story” is “make one and see what hap­pens”; as a Cus­tomer I see that as a time-​​boxed deliv­er­able, and demand it change to “spend one day mak­ing one, and pub­lish a result at the end of that day”.

(What I try never to do as “Cus­tomer” is assign expec­ta­tions of how long some­thing will take. I am there, at that moment, only to see the value in var­i­ous sto­ries as they’re pre­sented, and add new ones, and rearrange their order. If I need to decide how much might be done before the end of the iter­a­tion, or even whether one sin­gle “story” won’t or can’t fit in the allot­ted time, I’ve got to con­sciously switch over to “Maker” role. Oh, and also I try to avoid ever say­ing, “Go away, and never come back!” to myself….)

That’s how I try to run my research, and what I want to see in oth­ers. It’s safer explo­ration. It’s the oppo­site (as far as I can tell) of how aca­d­e­mics and STEM folks think most often, and absolutely the oppo­site of how school­work and most tech­ni­cal pro­fes­sional work is planned, because those are sim­ply given lists of com­pre­hen­sive require­ments. Bit three-​​ring binders full of “it must do all these things”.

Maybe the prob­lem is that these folks, start­ing off as they do with such deep antipa­thy to the cul­ture that led to the term, think the “Cus­tomer” role is some sort of per­mit for pre­ma­ture assess­ment, some kind of master:slave rela­tion­ship, a debt and an oner­ous promise to ful­fill that debt. But in prac­tice, sort­ing tasks by value does not entail pun­ish­ing fail­ures to deliver on those tasks (and this is the deep­est rea­son why mea­sur­ing “veloc­ity” is so fraught). “Let’s spend a day get­ting this bet­ter!” is not the same as “Get this done by Fri­day!” The for­mer implies that no mat­ter what happens—we get dis­tracted, we had an emer­gency, we couldn’t think of a way to make it bet­ter, we make it bet­ter enough that it goes away entirely—there’s always another round of plan­ning in which we can do the same thing again, another day some­where down the line where there is per­cep­ti­ble value in work­ing on that thing a bit more. And by the same argu­ment, it means that progress on other fronts is (for the moment) more valu­able than work­ing on that thing until it’s “done”!

It saves huge amounts of time to use the Cus­tomer role explic­itly. That saves my life, some days. It lets me have some­thing to show for my work every day. Me, the “Cus­tomer”. Oth­er­wise me, the “Devel­oper” would wan­der off some­where doing what­ever ran­dom crap caught his atten­tion, and end up rush­ing the use­ful work at the end.

I don’t know a bet­ter word than “Cus­tomer”. But I don’t know a bet­ter word than “agile” yet, and it’s get­ting close to the day when that also will need to change. I don’t think I can use the word in print any more, so I’m look­ing for a replace­ment soon. Spend a day think­ing about it and send me what­ever you find by the end of that day, OK?