Putting the Customer First in Enterprise Agile Frameworks

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Where has the customer gone in large scale enterprise agile frameworks? Customer Collaboration is one of the main tenants of the Agile Manifesto, but it seems that have we lost touch with this concept as we have scaled agile into large organizations. If we look at the SAFe Big Picture, the customer is represented, but only at the end of the process consuming the solution. This talk explores how and why it is important to pull the customer to the beginning and middle of the process and not just the end. This isn’t to pick on SAFe — the customer doesn’t appear at all on the graphics for Disciplined Agile, LeSS, and Nexus at all! The concepts and principles explored in this presentation are universal in any large enterprise and can, and should, be applied to to any framework.

Each of the main enterprise agile frameworks today (Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, etc) have a graphic representation of their model, which present an inside-out view of how an enterprise is organized to delivery in an agile fashion. But what do our agile enterprises look like from the outside, from our customers’ view point? As agile becomes widely adopted as the way of developing products, there is a growing gap with where new product development ideas are generated and how customer input is integrated into the agile process. Increasingly we are seeing organizations struggling because of a lack of an effective and experienced product management group and even experienced agile coaches not knowing how to effectively engage customers in their process.